Editorial policy
Who this site is for
Benefit Badger publishes plain-English guides to UK benefits and a deterministic eligibility check. It is an independent service. It is not affiliated with HMRC, DWP, Social Security Scotland or GOV.UK, and it cannot decide whether you will get a payment.
How we source
Every benefit page names a primary official source — usually GOV.UK, mygov.scot or nidirect — and links to the official claim route. We do not invent phone numbers or application URLs. If a source page does not publish a figure, we do not invent one.
Eligibility matching uses structured rules stored against each benefit, not a language model. Any explanation text is secondary to those rules and to the official page.
Nightly verification
A scheduled job at 03:15 Europe/London fetches official source pages (the GOV.UK Content API where it exists, otherwise the public HTML), hashes the content, and records a revision. When the source has been successfully checked, we stamp last verified on the benefit. That date means we confirmed the source still existed and could be read — not that we rewrote the page that night, and not that a rate figure was recalculated.
Scottish and Northern Ireland sources that are not on the GOV.UK Content API are checked through the same pipeline’s HTML fallback. Failures are logged and alerted. We would rather show an older verification date than guess.
Rates and tax years
We never publish a cash figure without a tax-year stamp shown on the page. UK rates usually change in April. If a stamp is for a previous tax year, the page says so and tells you to confirm the live amount on the official source. April is a freeze-and-review window, not a publishing window for new figures.
What we do not do
- We do not accept benefit claims.
- We do not charge for the eligibility check.
- We do not sell your answers.
- We do not generate combinatorial pages that differ by a sentence.
- We do not treat a language model as the source of truth for a rate or a rule.
Corrections
If you spot an error, email the address on the contact page with the page URL and the official source you think we have missed. We will check the primary source and correct the page if we are wrong. We do not argue with GOV.UK, mygov.scot or nidirect: if they have changed, we follow them.
Editorial responsibility for benefit accuracy sits with the Benefit Badger operators. There is no separate named journalist byline because the content is data-driven from official sources rather than reported as news.