Why this
exists
British public scandals tend to follow the same shape. Thousands of people are told individually that what happened to them was unusual and probably their own fault, and several years later a review concludes that it was systemic all along. By the time that finding arrives the damage has been done and the people responsible have moved on.
We exist to shorten that gap. This site keeps the documentation in one public place with the sources attached, so that somebody who has just opened a letter they do not understand can establish within a few minutes whether it has happened to other people, and what any review or committee eventually concluded about it.
What we publish
We work from coroners’ Prevention of Future Deaths reports, select committee findings, National Audit Office studies, court judgments and Freedom of Information disclosures, and we set ministerial statements against what the documents show subsequently happened. Wherever it is available we link the primary document rather than somebody else’s reporting of it.
What we do not do
- We do not publish a claim we cannot source, and if the document turns out not to support it then the sentence comes out before publication.
- We do not name junior public servants, because the target of this reporting is the department, the policy and the minister accountable for it.
- We do not quietly edit a live article. Corrections are published on the piece itself, dated, and they say what was wrong.
- We do not give legal or welfare advice, and we point readers towards the organisations that are qualified to give it.
On the name
The name is not a call for anybody to do anything to anyone. It is what a great many people have said out loud, alone at a kitchen table, holding a letter that has just halved their income for a reason nobody at the other end will explain. The site is named after that moment because it is the moment most of our readers arrive from.
The anger is where this starts rather than what it runs on. Everything after the masthead is sourced and checkable.
Independence
We have no party affiliation, we endorse no candidates, and we take no funding from anybody with an interest in what we cover. If any of that changes it will be declared at the top of this page before it appears anywhere else on the site.