Editorial policy

This page describes how Permitely pages are researched, sourced, checked and corrected. It records what we actually do; it is not a statement of aspiration. Everything below is in force for the calculator and report pages on this site.

Who publishes

Pages are written and maintained by Permitely Editorial. We do not publish under individual bylines and we claim no professional qualification in law, tax or immigration. Nothing here is legal, tax or immigration advice, and reading or using these pages creates no advisory relationship.

What counts as a source

Only primary material is used as the basis for a figure: statutes and the regulations made under them, official gazettes, the responsible agency's own published pages and manuals, and official fee, wage and threshold schedules. Press articles, blog posts and law-firm guidance are not used as the source of a number, even when they are accurate, because they are a report of the rule rather than the rule itself.

Where a value has a single authoritative document, that document is cited. Where a rule sits in one place and the amount in another — a statute that sets an entitlement and a schedule that sets the rate — both are cited.

Sources are linked on the page

A page's sourced figures carry a source block with the documents behind them as real links, so a reader can open the document and find the figure. A source named in prose but not linked does not count: our audit only registers a source that is an actual link on the page, and pages that carry no linked source are listed by every audit run until they have one.

The weekly audit

An automated audit runs every Thursday. It extracts the numbers shown on each page, fetches the sources linked from that page, and checks whether each number appears in the source text. Every number ends up in one of a few states: confirmed in the source, not found in the source, or unreadable because the source could not be collected that week.

The audit also judges the source itself. When almost none of a page's numbers can be found in the document it cites, the finding is not that the numbers are wrong but that the source does not cover them, and the page is queued for a better source. When a source fails to load for three consecutive weeks, it is reported as dead. Successfully collected source text is kept as a local copy, so a temporary outage at the publisher does not turn into a false alarm about the page.

What happens when something does not match

A mismatch is resolved in favour of the source document, not the page. If the primary document now says something different, the page is edited to match the document, including the wording around the figure. If a statement cannot be confirmed in any primary document, it is removed; it is not replaced with a plausible substitute, and a confirmation is never asserted that has not been read. If the value is real but the cited document does not carry it, the source is replaced with one that does, and the replacement is linked on the page.

Corrections are made directly to the page rather than logged as an erratum elsewhere, and each correction is committed with a note saying which document the new wording came from.

AI in the workflow

Drafts, page structure and explanatory text are produced with the help of AI tools. That is stated here because it is true of how the site is built, not as a disclaimer. A figure we add or change is checked against the primary document that sets it. The weekly audit then re-reads the sources and marks every figure it cannot find in them; each of those is resolved by finding the source, correcting the figure to the document, or removing the statement. Some numbers are ours rather than a document's — values the page computes, worked examples, a calculator's starting values — and some are estimates of private costs that no official document sets, such as professional fees or how long a step takes in practice. Those are outside the source check.

Reporting an error

Send corrections to [email protected]. The most useful report names the page, the figure you think is wrong, and the primary document you are reading — with that we can check the document and correct the page.

We cannot answer questions about individual cases, and we do not provide advice by email.

Limits you should carry with any figure

Thresholds change, sometimes mid-year and sometimes retroactively. A page reflects the primary documents as they read when it was last checked. Screening results are not determinations: an authority applying the same rule to your file may reach a different answer on facts we never see.