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Editorial standards

Assize News undertakes that each of its publications sets out its standards, its corrections policy and its complaints procedure. This is that undertaking discharged for The Assize: what is done to get things right, what is refused, and what happens when something is wrong anyway.

Who publishes this

The Assize is an Assize News publication, edited by Rose Traviss. Assize News is a trading name of Assize Data Ltd, a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 17510115. Registered office: c/o IWN Accountancy, The Echo Building, 18 Albert Road, Bournemouth, BH1 1BZ.

The Assize is an independent publication. It is not a court, tribunal or government body, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. It is not a regulator, it has no regulatory function, and nothing on it is a regulatory statement about anybody.

Primary sources, and nothing else

Everything here was read from a source that published it. There are four kinds and no fifth:

1. The regulators’ own registers, collected on the dates recorded at methodology and attributed to the regulator on every page that uses them.
2. The regulators’ own documents — annual reports, accounts, business plans, diversity surveys: 157 documents from the eight bodies listed at regulators’ annual reports, from which 56 measures are tracked.
3. The statute book and Hansard, through legislation.gov.uk and the Hansard API, both under the Open Government Licence v3.0, at in law.
4. Answers to freedom of information requests, where the body is a public authority under the Act — which 1 of 6 of these publishers are. See what can be asked, and of whom.

Nothing is taken from a commercial directory, a scraped profile, a press release repeated without checking, or court listings. No data is bought.

Accuracy: how a figure gets onto a page

The particular risk of a publication like this one is a confident wrong number. A hundred documents read by machine will eventually produce one, and the only defence a reader has is being able to see where it came from. So:

• Every figure carries the sentence it was read from, and a link to the document. If the sentence is missing, or if the figure does not appear in its own quoted sentence, the site does not build. That is a check, not a habit: it runs on every figure on every build.
• A figure a regulator has restated is published twice, with both values and both documents, and the later one is used. Where two documents of the same vintage disagree, the disagreement is shown rather than resolved.
• A count that is incomplete is labelled as a floor. The enforcement agent register stopped answering partway through collection, so the figure is published as “at least”, and a page that prints it without saying so fails the build.
• Our count and the regulator’s are published side by side where both exist, with the reason they differ, at reports. Where they cannot be reconciled, that is the finding.
• Nothing is inferred onto a person’s page. A page about a named practitioner carries what their regulator publishes about them and no deduction of ours.

How this site is made, said plainly

The Assize is a data publication. The registers, documents and statutory references behind it are collected and read by programs written for the purpose, and the pages are generated from what those programs produce. That is how one editor can hold 9,151 register entries and 157 documents at once, and it is also the source of the failure mode described above.

What follows from it, and is the reason the checks exist: an extraction is never published on the strength of having run. It is published with the sentence it came from, so that a reader can see the same thing the program saw. Analysis and articles are written against those sources and checked back against them before publication, and where a source will not support a claim, the claim is dropped and the fact that it was dropped is usually recorded on the page.

Fairness

• Nobody is rated, ranked or scored, and there are no reviews. No page carries a judgment of a named practitioner’s competence, because none could be supported by a register.
• Disciplinary and regulatory findings are reproduced in the regulator’s own words, with a link to the regulator’s page, and are published only while the regulator publishes them. They are never summarised into a conclusion of ours and never aggregated into a score.
• Reporting is kept separate from comment. An article that argues something says so; a page that reports a figure reports it.
• A right of reply. Anybody named, or any body whose figures or conduct are the subject of an article, may answer it, and the answer will be published with the piece or linked from it. Write to enquiries@assizedata.co.uk.

The law on reporting

Assize News publishes court reporting; The Assize reports on regulators and the professions they regulate. Both are inside the same rules, and the ones that bear on this publication are these.

• Contempt of court. Nothing is published that creates a substantial risk of serious prejudice to active proceedings, and nothing here is derived from court listings.
• Reporting restrictions and anonymity. Where an order under section 4(2) or section 11 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, or a statutory anonymity provision, covers a matter, it is followed. A regulator’s decision notice that names a person who is anonymous in connected proceedings is not republished here on the strength of the regulator having published it.
• Defamation. Findings are quoted and attributed; the site does not characterise conduct in its own words where a regulator has characterised it in theirs.
• Personal data. Contact details are never published, from any source, although six of these registers publish them and one publishes photographs. Removal from this site is unconditional: no reason is asked and no balancing exercise is performed. See privacy and correct or remove an entry.

Money, and what it is not allowed to buy

No page on this site carries advertising, a paid listing, a sponsored entry or a sold lead, and nobody can pay to appear or to be removed: removal is free either way. If advertising or sponsorship is ever carried, it will be labelled as such, it will never appear on a page about a named person, and it will never determine what is published about anybody.

Assize Data Ltd sells data analysis to the legal sector. Where an article touches a body that is, or has been, a customer, that is disclosed in the article.

Corrections and complaints

When something here is wrong it is corrected promptly and openly, and the correction is recorded rather than quietly absorbed: corrections. If you want to complain about something published, rather than have it corrected, the procedure and its timescales are at complaints.

The Assize is not a member of IPSO or IMPRESS and is not regulated by either. It follows the standards on this page, which are published so they can be held against it, and its complaints procedure ends with the courts and — for anything about personal data — with the Information Commissioner. That is said plainly because a reader is entitled to know which of those two things they are dealing with.

Changes to this page

This page is versioned with the rest of the site. When a standard here changes, the change is described at corrections rather than made silently. Anything in it that concerns personal data sits inside Assize Data Ltd’s data protection policy, which covers Assize News and every other name the company trades under.