About and how we work
Tracked Changes reads UK government legislation, guidance and playbooks line by line and checks what they claim against the evidence they cite. It is run by Kevin Yeandel as part of the Watch network, alongside yeandel.co.uk and its sister sites. The site carries display advertising served through Google AdSense. Advertisers have no say in what is covered or what a teardown finds: there is no sponsored content, and nobody pays for coverage or for the absence of it.
The method
Every piece follows the same discipline. The document's own words are quoted, with page or section references, and tested against the evidence the document itself cites plus the public record. Every claim we make carries a numbered citation to a source you can open. Every URL is fetched before it is cited. When a document turns out to do what it says, we say that, in public, under a CLEARED verdict: a clean bill of health is a publishable finding, not a wasted read.
The MP record
Behind the teardowns sits a rolling twelve-month record of what all 650 UK MPs have said, asked and voted on in Parliament: more than 200,000 dated records (and growing daily) drawn from Parliament's own open data, every one attributable to a named MP and carrying a source URL back to the parliamentary record. That attribution is the point. A claim about a contradiction is only worth making if a reader can open the source and check it.
The record is held and analysed entirely on one local machine, which cross-checks each MP's stated positions against what they publicly endorse elsewhere and against the business events around their decisions, and surfaces the inconsistencies for a human to review. Nothing from it is published automatically: the system only pulls public data in, it never publishes outward, and because it names real public figures, the human-review gate and the local-only posture are both deliberate. Findings from the record reach this site only when they clear the same standard as everything else here: quoted, dated, cited. They are published on the MP Record page.
The tier model
Nothing gets a full teardown by default. Every document our scanner finds lands in the Daily Register and is escalated only when it earns it:
- Tier 0, the registry. Every scanned document is logged: title, source URL, publication date, issuing department, document type, and a hash of its content so changes cannot pass silently. Nothing is written about it.
- Tier 1, the register digest. A short neutral entry: what the document is, who issued it, what changes, key dates, and a link to the canonical text. No judgement, no adjectives.
- Tier 2, the structured teardown. Every material claim extracted and checked against the evidence cited for it, contradictions with the department's other guidance, missing enforcement mechanisms, unfunded mandates and undefined success criteria. A person reviews and signs off every one before publication.
- Tier 3, the deep teardown. The full editorial treatment, reserved for cornerstone documents. The AI Playbook teardown is the house exemplar.
What escalates a document
A document is scored for a Tier 2 teardown when at least two of these apply, and Tier 3 when four or more do:
- It affects a population above roughly a million people, or a sector above roughly a billion pounds of spend
- It creates new enforcement powers or offences
- It contradicts, amends or quietly weakens a document we already track
- It has high public search salience (housing, data protection, employment)
- It accompanies a live political controversy or a consultation with a deadline
- It is a first-of-kind framework with no enforcement or review clause
- It is an update to a document we have already torn down; these always escalate, and the piece diffs the versions explicitly
The standards we hold ourselves to
No fabricated entries: nothing appears in the register without a working source URL, a timestamp and a tier label, and if a source feed fails we skip it and say so rather than guess. Updates to tracked documents produce an explicit record of what changed, never a silent overwrite. Substantive errors are corrected in the article and logged permanently in the corrections log. If you think something here is wrong, the fastest route is the contact form: name the claim and the document that contradicts it.