Closed 16 October 2026

The Justice Index, January to October 2026

The Justice Index was a network of fifteen free reference sites on the justice system of England and Wales: enforcement, courts, sentencing, policing, legislation, statutes, prisons, penalties, precedents, rulings, appeals, inquests, jurisdiction, tribunals, and this hub. I built it and ran it myself. This page is the record of what it was, what it reached, what it took to keep accurate, and why I closed it.

What it was

About twenty-seven thousand pages across the fifteen sites, drawn from one graph of around eleven million records: courts, offences, laws and their sections, cases, fees, forms, prisons and police forces. Every site was free, with no accounts, no advertising, no paywall and no tracking beyond anonymous page counts. The first site went up in January 2026 and all fifteen were live by May.

What it reached

Most readers arrived from search, with Bing sending twice as many as Google. By the autumn the sites were being cited by the assistants people now ask first, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot among them. Nothing was ever spent on promotion.

What it took to keep accurate

In March 2026 every page was read against its primary source. That pass found and fixed 539 errors across some twenty-five thousand individual claims. After it came the machinery: monitors that watched legislation.gov.uk, the court finder, the fees orders and the sentencing guidelines for change; an engine that refreshed court and police force records from their official sources; a fortnightly check that scored every statement on every page against the provision it cited; and a hand review of each site in turn, most-read first.

Each layer caught something the last had missed. Each also missed things. A set of court fee pages stayed wrong for months while the verifier showed them green, because it was checking that the Order existed, not that the figures matched it. In one week in October, three hundred and sixty pages were quietly serving an older copy of their text than the database held. The automated statement check found about half of what a careful human read found. And a large part of the prose, written to explain rather than to cite, had no source a machine could check it against at all.

What I learned

Accuracy on a legal reference site is not a feature you add. It is a cost you pay every fortnight for every page, for as long as the page is up. Hand-written legal prose at this scale cannot be kept right by one person, and no amount of checking substitutes for fewer pages with better sources. The honest end of "accuracy is a process" is knowing when the process is bigger than you are.

I would do it again smaller: records generated from verified sources, prose only where it cites something that can be checked, and nothing published that cannot be kept current.

What remains

Two sites continue, kept by hand: enforcement.uk, where this started, and policing.uk. The other thirteen closed on 16 October 2026.

The Justice Index was published by HCEO Ltd and closed on 16 October 2026. For current information on the law use the official sources: GOV.UK, legislation.gov.uk and HM Courts and Tribunals Service.