Our mistakes, in public
This site was built quickly and checked by the people who built it. We have already found errors in our own work. They are listed here in plain words, newest first, with what was wrong, what is right, and whether it affects what you can read here. We will add to this list every time we find another, including when nothing on the site changed.
What you should assume
- This is a beta. It has not been independently reviewed. Treat every figure as something to check against the official source linked beside it.
- A reader cannot yet send us a report from this site. The report page says so. Until that works, the corrections below are the ones we found ourselves.
- "Reconciled" means the rows we hold equal the total the publisher reports. It does not mean the publisher's data is right.
The log
12 October 2026
A telephone-number check flagged two company pages by mistake
What we said or did: Our new check for contact details flagged two company pages as containing a telephone number.
What is right: The "numbers" were registration numbers of corporate controllers, which are official identifiers and not phone numbers. The check now ignores a number in the identifier slot of a controller row. A real telephone number is still caught, and a test proves both.
How we found it: Our own build checks, before this site was first published.
Effect on this site: No effect on what you can read here. It is recorded because it shows how the checks behave.
11 October 2026
Our plan for reading Members' biographies undercounted the work
What we said or did: We planned about 2,800 requests to the Parliament Members API for biographies.
What is right: The API lists 5,211 members across both Houses, so both Houses need about 5,583 requests. Commons only needs about 2,600.
How we found it: A check of the API's own totals before any large crawl.
Effect on this site: None on this site. Biographies are not collected yet.
October 2026
A storage fault silently overwrote saved pages, while our totals still matched
What we said or did: Our checks said every source was complete because the number of requests we made equalled the total the publisher reported.
What is right: A shared file name meant some saved pages were replaced by later ones. About 2,500 Democracy Club pages, 148 government document records and 1 collection record were affected. Counting requests proved nothing about what was stored. We now count the records actually stored, and every stored file has a unique name.
How we found it: An audit of the list of files we had written, which showed the same file name used twice.
Effect on this site: The Democracy Club capture is set aside and not used. The 148 government document records are still to be fetched again, so some details on government return pages (such as document titles) are incomplete until then.
October 2026
Our search did not work, and the check that should have caught it passed
What we said or did: We said the search covered all donor companies.
What is right: The search index file was never created, so search could only find companies already listed on the page. The check passed because it looked for a company that was already on the page. The search now loads a real index, and the check looks for a company in the middle of it.
How we found it: Our own review of the finished site, not by a reader.
Effect on this site: Fixed before first publication.
October 2026
Gift and hospitality counts included returns that declared nothing
What we said or did: We counted every row in the ministers' and officials' gift and hospitality returns as a gift or an item of hospitality.
What is right: About half the rows are "nil returns": a department saying it had nothing to declare. They are not gifts or hospitality. Counts now exclude them, and the number of nil returns is shown beside the count.
How we found it: Reading the rows themselves while checking a chart.
Effect on this site: Charts built earlier overstated gifts and hospitality. They were corrected before publication. The front page now shows how many rows are nil returns.
October 2026
Some dates in government returns were read wrongly, distorting yearly counts
What we said or did: Our first reading of dates in government returns mixed up day and month in some rows and missed others.
What is right: Dates are now read with fixed rules. Of 492,294 date cells, 155 could not be read and are reported as unreadable instead of guessed.
How we found it: A comparison of parsed dates against the period each return covers.
Effect on this site: Yearly counts changed after the fix. Charts built earlier were rebuilt.
October 2026
A chart caption claimed more than the data shows
What we said or did: A timeline said election years carry more donations.
What is right: The data shows only that two of the three tallest years (2019 and 2024) were election years. The caption now says that and nothing more.
How we found it: Our own review of wording against the numbers.
Effect on this site: Fixed before publication.
October 2026
We said individual donors carry postcodes. They do not.
What we said or did: Two of our own documents said that individual donors in the Electoral Commission data carry postcodes.
What is right: None of the 42,338 individual donor rows has a postcode. Both documents are corrected.
How we found it: Counting the column in the data after an assistant's report said it was there.
Effect on this site: No postcodes of individuals were ever shown here. The claim was only in our notes.
October 2026
We quoted the wrong number of House of Lords divisions and of peers with entries
What we said or did: Our notes said 437 House of Lords divisions and 703 peers with register entries.
What is right: The data holds 3,297 Lords divisions and 682 peers with entries.
How we found it: Counting from the stored files.
Effect on this site: Notes corrected. These counts are not shown on this site yet.
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