Editorial policy

Check Local publishes guides to help people choose where to live. This page explains how they are written and checked, what they will never do, and how to tell us when we get something wrong.

Where the facts come from

• Every figure and factual claim in a guide comes from a published source: the body that produces the data (ONS, HM Land Registry, police.uk, Ofsted, GOV.UK and others) or Check Local's own processing of that open data. Each guide lists its sources at the foot.
• Where we quote our own figures, they are the same ones the area pages show, with the same limits. How we measure areas explains them, and Data sources lists every dataset and how often it is refreshed.
• If we can't find a source for a claim, it doesn't go in. Worked examples (for instance, a mortgage on a £300,000 home) are labelled as examples, not presented as averages.

How a guide is made

We use AI tools to help research and draft. Before anything is published, a person checks every figure and claim against its source and edits the text. AI is a drafting aid, not the author of record, and nothing is published automatically.

What a guide will never do

• Forecast prices. We describe what the data shows has happened. We don't predict what an area's prices will do, or call anywhere an investment opportunity.
• Give advice. Guides are general information, not financial, mortgage, legal or surveying advice. For a decision about your own circumstances, speak to a qualified professional.
• Take payment. No business pays to appear in a guide, and nothing a business pays affects an area's scores, its summaries or which areas a guide names. (Paid business listings are a separate, labelled feature: how listings work.)
• Hide a gap. When a dataset doesn't cover somewhere, or a figure may be wrong, the guide says so. For example, Greater Manchester's street-level crime data is currently incomplete, so we don't score safety there.

Where guides apply

Check Local covers England, Scotland and Wales. It does not cover Northern Ireland. Rules often differ between the nations (school admissions and inspection, for example), so each guide says which nations it applies to beside its date.

Keeping guides current

Each guide shows when it was last checked. Every guide is re-read against its sources at least once a year, and sooner when the law or a source it relies on changes.

Reusing our research

The tables and downloads in our research pieces are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: credit “Check Local” and link to the piece. They are built from public data published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, so keep the source's own attribution too. Each piece gives it beside its downloads.

Corrections

If something in a guide looks wrong, email [email protected] with the page and what you think is wrong. We will check it against the source and, if we were wrong, correct the guide and update its date.

Area summaries are different

The plain-English summaries on area pages are written by an AI model directly from that area's figures, without a person reading each one first. They are told not to invent anything, but they can still simplify or make mistakes, so the figures on the page are always the source of truth. Data sources explains more.