We report the British state
against its own paper trail.
We cover what the British state does to the people it is supposed to serve, using the documents it would rather nobody read closely. Every claim on this site is linked to the coroner’s report, select committee finding, audit report or court judgment it came from, so you can check it against the source instead of taking our word for it.
13 published articles across 6 sections, with every correction published on the piece itself
Carers who earned a pound over the weekly threshold lost an entire week of benefit. The DWP held the earnings data that would have flagged it and in many cases did nothing with it for years before demanding the money back. The independent review published in November 2025 found the fault lay with the department.
Read moreSuppliers referred by MPs, peers and ministers were placed in a high priority lane for PPE contracts. PPE Medpro, referred by Baroness Michelle Mone, had been incorporated seven weeks earlier and held £100. It won contracts worth over £200m and was later ordered to repay £122m.
Read moreSub-postmasters were prosecuted on the evidence of accounting software the Post Office had been told could produce false shortfalls. Sir Wyn Williams published his findings on redress separately, in July 2025, because years after exoneration people were still waiting to be compensated.
Read moreSomewhere to compare notes with people going through the same process, and to find out whether the letter that made no sense to you has made no sense to anybody else either.
Join usPrevention of Future Deaths reports sent to the DWP by coroners since 2013
Estimated UK tax gap for 2022-23, up from £38.1bn the year before
Unpaid child maintenance projected on Collect and Pay by March 2031
HMRC callers disconnected in eleven months after holding for 70 minutes
Decisions taken in Whitehall and what happened after the news cycle moved on. We follow announcements through to the inquiry reports and committee findings that eventually assess them.
Read this sectionPublic money moving towards people who happened to know a minister. This section covers procurement, conflicts of interest and the watchdogs that arrived long after the contracts were signed.
Read this sectionCoroners have been writing to the Department for Work and Pensions about the deaths of benefit claimants for more than a decade. This section tracks what they warned, what the department promised in reply, and what actually changed.
Read this sectionThe Child Maintenance Service manages billions in arrears it cannot collect and calculations that neither parent can follow. Receiving parents and paying parents both end up convinced the state is working against them, and the audit reports suggest both have a point.
Read this sectionA revenue service that pursued contractors through a policy linked to at least ten suicides while roughly £40bn a year went uncollected, and let the phones ring out for everybody else.
Read this sectionMinisters rarely say anything that is flatly untrue. They rely instead on a small set of familiar constructions that sound like denials without committing to anything. This section logs them and checks them against what the documents show.
Read this sectionMost of the scandals documented on this site began with thousands of people being told separately that their case was unusual and probably their own fault. The community exists so that you can find out whether that is true before you accept it.