How Our Content Is Created

Civil Help is committed to providing accurate, practical, and up-to-date information about UK rights, processes, and support options. This page explains how we research, write, and maintain our content.

Sources

All Civil Help guides are based on:

  • Primary legislation — Acts of Parliament published on legislation.gov.uk
  • Official government guidance — GOV.UK, NHS.UK, and devolved government websites
  • Regulatory guidance — published by Ofgem, Ofcom, FCA, ICO, CQC, HSE, and other regulators
  • Ombudsman decisions — published decisions from the Financial Ombudsman Service, PHSO, LGSCO, and others
  • Case law — relevant court and tribunal decisions that clarify how the law applies in practice
  • Expert organisations — Citizens Advice, Shelter, Acas, Age UK, and other authoritative charities

Editorial Process

  1. Research — we identify the topic, gather primary sources, and check for recent legislative or policy changes
  2. Writing — content is drafted in plain English, structured around what users need to know and do, not around legal abstractions
  3. Fact-checking — every factual claim is verified against an official source. Monetary figures are cross-checked against GOV.UK publications
  4. Review — content is reviewed for accuracy, clarity, completeness, and accessibility before publication
  5. Publication — the guide is published with a "last reviewed" date and tagged with its applicable nation scope

Rates and Figures

UK benefit rates, tax thresholds, and statutory amounts change every April. We maintain a centralised rates file that is verified against GOV.UK each April. When rates change, all guides that reference those figures are updated.

The current rates file was last verified on 24 August 2026 and covers the 2026/27 tax year. The next scheduled review is 6 April 2027.

Verification Standards

For each topic area we verify our position against a defined set of authoritative sources. These are the named documents we treat as binding for accuracy:

  • Benefits and welfare: the relevant DWP regulations and the Decision Makers' Guide; the Universal Credit, PIP, and ESA handbooks; HMRC's tax-credits manual; the published rates schedule on GOV.UK.
  • Employment: the Employment Rights Act 1996, Equality Act 2010, the ACAS Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures, the EHRC Code of Practice on Employment, and Employment Tribunal procedure rules.
  • Housing: the Housing Act 1988 and 1985, the Tenant Fees Act 2019, the Renters' Rights Bill / Act, the Homelessness Code of Guidance, and Shelter England's legal guides.
  • Immigration: the Immigration Rules (Appendix-by-Appendix), Home Office modernised guidance for caseworkers, and the published UKVI fees and processing times.
  • Complaints and ombudsmen: each scheme's published rules — FOS DISP, PHSO, LGSCO, Energy Ombudsman, Property Ombudsman, Legal Ombudsman, ICO complaints procedure.
  • Care and later life: the Care Act 2014, the Mental Capacity Act 2005, CHC National Framework, the Office of the Public Guardian guidance, and CQC fundamental standards.
  • Family and victims: the Family Procedure Rules, CMS guidance, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, and the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime.
  • Business compliance: Companies House guidance, HMRC employer handbooks, ICO data protection guidance, HSE guidance, and FCA Handbook (DISP, MIPRU).

When these sources conflict — which is rare but happens, particularly during transitional legislation — we follow the primary statute and note the divergence with the date of the conflict.

Corrections Pledge

If a guide is wrong, we want to fix it. Our pledge is straightforward:

  • Acknowledge within 3 working days of being notified of an issue through the feedback widget.
  • Correct factual errors within 14 days for active legislative or rate issues; sooner where the error could materially mislead someone.
  • Document material changes in our public changelogso readers can see what changed and when.
  • Update review dates when a substantive correction is made, so the published last-reviewed date reflects the most recent verified state.

Errata

Substantive corrections made to published guides. Cosmetic edits and link fixes are not listed here — only changes to figures, statutory references, or the substance of advice.

  • 20 August 2026 — /care-later-life/care-cap-reform (and the former /care-later-life/care-cap-reform-status, now merged into it). Was: The care cap page described the £86,000 lifetime cap on personal care costs as legislated but delayed, said the government had 'not confirmed a new start date', and explained in the future tense how metering, care accounts and the independent personal budget would work once it commenced. A second page on the same topic correctly recorded that the cap had been abandoned; both were published simultaneously, and the page giving the wrong account held the URL the rest of the site linked to. Now: The cap was abandoned on 29 July 2024 in the Chancellor's statement on the public spending inheritance and never came into force. The page now says so, and explains that this was a decision not to commence rather than a repeal — Care Act 2014 s.15 remains on the statute book marked prospective and Health and Care Act 2022 s.166 was never commenced, which is why other sources still describe the scheme in the future tense. The planned increase in the capital limits to £100,000 and £20,000 fell with it, so the England limits remain £23,250 and £14,250. The page also previously attributed the current review to a 'Sue Gray review' and gave its reporting dates as 2027 and 2028; it is the Casey Commission, and following the acceleration announced on 29 July 2026 it is expected to report by summer 2027. (factual correction, commit 2225ed1)
  • 20 August 2026 — Personal Expenses Allowance and the deferred payment Disposable Income Allowance across care-later-life guides, questions, comparisons and the glossary. Was: The Personal Expenses Allowance — the income a resident in local-authority-funded care must be left with — appeared as four different figures at once: £30, £30.15, £30.65 and, in the guide to deferred payment agreements, £144. The £30.15 and £28.25 figures were the 2024-25 and 2023-24 rates still being published as current. The £144 was described as the Personal Expenses Allowance for residents with a deferred payment agreement. Now: All references resolve through a single entry in rates.ts. The England figure for 2026-27 is £31.80. Because the devolved figures differ materially, they are now stated rather than left to be inferred from the England rate: Scotland £37.65, the Welsh Minimum Income Amount £46.35, and Northern Ireland £36.62. The £144 was not a Personal Expenses Allowance at all — it is the Disposable Income Allowance, a separate and much larger allowance available only under a deferred payment agreement, and it is now named and explained as such. Describing it as the PEA overstated what an ordinary resident keeps by roughly four times. (factual correction, commit 2225ed1)
  • 20 August 2026 — /grants-funding/community-ownership-fund and the community funding guide. Was: The Community Ownership Fund guide was written throughout in the present tense — it described the fund as providing match-funding of up to £1m, set out the two-stage application process as something a reader could still enter, and advised checking the current prospectus for the latest eligibility criteria. Only one citation label, tucked in the sources, recorded that the fund had closed. The guide also named the sponsoring department as the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities as a present-tense statement of fact. Now: The fund is closed and the page says so first. GOV.UK states there will be no further application windows; the final round closed on 10 April 2024, and the programme awarded £135m to 409 projects across the UK. The page now records what the fund did, explains what replaces it — the Community Right to Buy created by the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, which is not yet in force, and a £61m fund announced in June 2026 with no prospectus or application route open — and tells anyone holding a half-prepared bid which parts of it transfer to other funders. The department has been the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government since July 2024. Citations dated to the DLUHC era deliberately keep that name. (factual correction)
  • 20 August 2026 — /immigration-visas seasonal worker visa guide and /business-compliance modern slavery guidance. Was: Both guides named the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority as the current regulator for labour exploitation in agriculture, horticulture, shellfish gathering and food processing, and directed workers who believed they were being exploited to contact it. Now: The GLAA was abolished by s.148(1) of the Employment Rights Act 2025, commenced on 7 April 2026, and its functions passed to the Fair Work Agency. The guides now name the Fair Work Agency, state when and why the change happened so a worker holding older material recognises it as the same body, and point at the relocated public licensing register. Two things did not change and the guides now say so explicitly: the reporting line 0800 432 0804 was carried over unchanged, and licensing under the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 continues, with licences granted before April 2026 still valid. (statutory update, commit 7d340bf)
  • 19 August 2026 — ACAS early conciliation limitation extension and Self Assessment late-filing penalties in the deadline calculator. Was: The early conciliation 'stop the clock' extension to employment tribunal time limits was cited as s.207B of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, and Self Assessment late-filing penalties were cited as Schedule 55 to the Taxes Management Act 1970. Both citations appeared in the calculator's user-facing methodology as well as in its source links. Now: The early conciliation provision is s.207B of the Employment Rights Act 1996 — TULR(C)A 1992 has no s.207B. Late-filing penalties are governed by Schedule 55 to the Finance Act 2009, not the Taxes Management Act 1970, which has no Schedule 55. The deadlines themselves were correct; only the authority cited for them was wrong. (source review, commit 52a7715)
  • 11 August 2026 — Collective redundancy protective awards across employment-rights and business-compliance guides; /employment-rights paternity leave; and the pre-April-2026 figures in the SSP calculator. Was: The protective award for breaching collective redundancy consultation duties was given as up to 90 days' pay in five places. Paternity leave was described as requiring 26 weeks' continuous service. The SSP calculator used a Lower Earnings Limit of £123 and the current £123.25 weekly rate when assessing sickness that began before 6 April 2026. Now: The protective award is up to 180 days' pay, doubled by the Employment Rights Act 2025 with effect from 6 April 2026. The separate threshold that triggers collective consultation — 20 or more redundancies within any 90-day period — is unchanged. Paternity leave has been a day-one right since 6 April 2026, as has ordinary parental leave; statutory paternity pay keeps its own 26-week and earnings conditions, so it is now possible to qualify for the leave but not the pay. The SSP calculator now uses the correct 2025/26 figures for pre-reform sickness: a £125 Lower Earnings Limit and a £118.75 weekly rate. (statutory update)
  • 31 July 2026 — Calculators: statutory redundancy pay, notice period, Employment Tribunal limitation, Mandatory Reconsideration deadline; and the unfair dismissal compensatory award cap wherever it is cited. Was: Four calculation errors. (1) Redundancy pay applied the age multiplier using the employee's age at the END of each year of service, so a year in which someone turned 41 on the last day was paid at 1.5 weeks instead of 1 — overstating awards at each age boundary. (2) Redundancy service was measured by dividing elapsed time by an averaged 365.25-day year, so exactly two years' service spanning no leap day came out as 1.99 years and the tool reported no entitlement at all. (3) Notice periods were captured in whole years, so anyone with one to eleven months' service was told the statutory minimum was zero weeks. (4) Deadline tools added calendar months with JavaScript's setMonth, which rolls 31 January forward to 3 March, and compared UTC dates against local midnight, drifting by a day in British Summer Time. The unfair dismissal compensatory award cap was also still shown as the 2025/26 figure of £118,223. Now: Redundancy uses the age at the START of each year of service, matching the statutory test of "each full year you were 41 or older", and counts service with calendar arithmetic. Notice periods are captured in months and follow Employment Rights Act 1996 s.86 exactly: nothing under one month, one week from one month to two years, then one week per complete year to a twelve-week cap. Date arithmetic now clamps to the end of the target month and works entirely in UTC. The compensatory award cap is £123,543 from 6 April 2026, per the Schedule to SI 2026/310. The Employment Tribunal calculator also now applies the extended six-month limit to acts occurring on or after 1 October 2026, while keeping three months for earlier acts, as the transitional provisions require. (factual correction)
  • 31 July 2026 — /housing-renting/renters-rights-act-implementation-timeline, /wizards/is-section-21-valid, /compare/section-21-vs-section-8, and Section 21 references across housing-renting guides, checklists and the glossary. Was: Section 21 abolition was described as a future event awaiting a commencement order — variously 'expected late 2026 or 2027' and, in one FAQ, 'as at May 2026 that order has not yet been made'. The 'Is my Section 21 notice valid?' wizard walked users through validating a notice as though Section 21 were still available. Two duplicate comparison entries shared the slug section-21-vs-section-8, so one was unreachable. Now: Section 21 was abolished in England on 1 May 2026 by the Renters' Rights Act 2025, for existing tenancies as well as new ones. Guides now state that as fact, record the 31 July 2026 transitional deadline for issuing possession claims on notices served before commencement, and distinguish the phases still outstanding (mandatory Database registration from late 2026; Awaab's Law and the Decent Homes Standard for private rentals not yet commenced). The wizard has been repointed to 'Is my Section 21 notice still enforceable?' and now gates on the service date and whether a claim was issued in time before running the historic validity checks. The duplicate comparison entry has been removed. (statutory update)
  • 31 July 2026 — /employment-rights/statutory-sick-pay, /tools/ssp-calculator, /tools/calc/ssp-entitlement and SSP references across employment-rights guides. Was: SSP was described as beginning only on the fourth consecutive day of sickness (three unpaid "waiting days") and as requiring average weekly earnings of at least the Lower Earnings Limit. The SSP calculator returned "Not eligible" to anyone earning below £125 a week. Now: SSP is shown as a day-one right with no minimum-earnings test, paid at the flat weekly rate or 80% of average weekly earnings if that is lower. Section 10 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 abolished the waiting days and removed the Lower Earnings Limit condition with effect from 6 April 2026 (commenced by SI 2026/373). Sickness that began before that date is still assessed under the former rules, and both calculators now branch on the first day of sickness. Lowest-paid employees who were previously told they did not qualify are now entitled. (statutory update)
  • 25 April 2026 — All rate-citing guides. Was: 2025/26 figures (UC standard allowance £400.14, PIP daily-living enhanced £110.40, etc.). Now: 2026/27 figures (UC standard allowance £424.90, PIP daily-living enhanced £114.60, plus the new LCWRA two-tier rate of £429.80 protected / £217.26 new claimants from April 2026). (statutory update, commit 1ab4899)
  • 25 April 2026 — 8 guides across benefits-support, business-compliance, care-later-life, complaints-ombudsmen, driving, victims-crime. Was: Broken double-nested anchor tags created by an automated gov.uk linker (e.g. `<a href="https://www.<a href="…">…</a>">…</a>`). Now: Single clean anchor tags pointing to the correct GOV.UK page. (factual correction, commit 8832c9f)
  • 28 April 2026 — /business-compliance/corporation-tax. Was: Three sections covering rates, deductions, and deadlines (~360 words). Now: Four sections plus a new "Penalties, records, and disputes with HMRC" section covering Schedule 18 FA 1998 penalty regime, the six-year record-keeping rule, statutory reviews, First-tier Tribunal appeals, and Time-to-Pay arrangements (~700 words). (source review)

Review Schedule

Every guide carries a "last reviewed" date. We aim to review all content at least annually, with priority given to:

  • Guides affected by legislative changes (e.g. new Acts, statutory instruments)
  • Guides with monetary figures that change annually
  • Guides covering areas with active policy reform (e.g. immigration, housing)
  • Guides flagged by user feedback as potentially outdated

What We Are Not

Civil Help is not a law firm, not a government website, and not affiliated with any regulator or ombudsman. We do not provide personalised legal, financial, immigration, or tax advice. Our content is general information designed to help you understand your options and find the right next step.

For matters that affect your legal rights, finances, or immigration status, we always recommend seeking qualified professional advice. We link to relevant official bodies and free advice services throughout our guides.

Corrections and Feedback

If you spot an error, an outdated figure, or content that is unclear, please let us know using the "Was this helpful?" widget at the bottom of any guide. Your feedback helps us maintain accuracy.

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