Editorial policy

Who writes this

Every content page carries a named author, and on this site that is Andrew Pickett, who researches and writes it. He holds no trade qualification and the byline does not suggest one: it names the person who wrote the page and links to a description of how he wrote it.

Writing a page and reviewing it are separate claims, and only the first is filled here. The policy is that a page rated "get it checked" or "stop — call an engineer" also carries a named reviewer holding the relevant qualification — Gas Safe Register registration for gas work on the UK property — with both names and the registration number shown on the page.

No page carries a reviewer byline, because no registered engineer has reviewed one. We would rather show you an empty space than a name that has not read the page. So the byline states both halves together: who wrote the page, and that no engineer has reviewed it. The panel below it lists the sources the page was written from and says the same thing at greater length. Neither statement is allowed to be softened to make the other read better.

How a page gets published

A page cannot go live until all of the following are true:

• The one-sentence summary genuinely answers the question, in 15 to 35 words.
• The explanation of what the code means runs to at least 60 words of real detail.
• There are at least two distinct causes, ranked by how often they actually occur.
• There are either two or more safe steps a reader can take, or an explicit statement that there are none and why.
• Severity is set, and a page rated "stop — call an engineer" carries no do-it-yourself steps at all.
• There is a cost range, or a stated reason one cannot honestly be given.
• The page links to at least three other pages that exist.
• The page is not substantially a copy of another page on the site.
• The page states whether an engineer has reviewed it. Where none has, it says so.

Pages that fail any of these are not published to search engines. They stay reachable and linked, marked so they are not indexed, until they improve.

Note what the fifth rule does and does not say. Review is not a condition of publishing, at any severity, because no page here has a reviewer and a page nobody can find protects nobody — the realistic alternative to an honest unreviewed page here is a page elsewhere that discloses nothing at all. Disclosure is the condition instead, and it is structural rather than a matter of remembering: with no reviewer on record there is no byline, no "checked by" line and no reviewer in the page's structured data, and the sources panel says outright that nobody has reviewed it.

Corrections

Every code page carries a "something wrong on this page?" link. Reports go to a queue we work through with a target of five working days. If we got something wrong we change it and update the reviewed date. If a manufacturer or an engineer tells us a procedure has changed, that outranks our existing copy.

Independence

Advertising, affiliate links and lead partnerships are disclosed where they appear. No commercial arrangement influences a severity rating, a safety instruction, or whether we recommend calling someone. Nobody can pay to have a code marked less serious than it is, or to be listed as a cause.