How pages are written and checked
Editorial policy
What is promised about accuracy, what happens when it fails, and the lines this site will not cross.
The standard, and who holds us to it
Work Terms is written to the Editors’ Code of Practice — the code administered by IPSO and used across the UK press — in the parts that apply to a site like this one: clause 1 on accuracy and the duty to correct, and clause 13 on financial journalism.
It is not a member of IPSO or IMPRESS, and saying otherwise would be the first breach of the code it claims to follow. That has a consequence worth stating plainly rather than burying: there is no external regulator you can appeal to if you are unhappy with how a complaint is handled here. The complaints path below ends with the person who runs the site.
Which is precisely why the accuracy machinery is public and mechanical rather than a promise. A one-person site cannot borrow trust from a regulator, so it has to be checkable instead.
Accuracy
The product is accuracy: a wrong pay figure is worse than no pay figure, because someone budgets against it.
- Figures are imported, never derived. Every rate is transcribed from a named, dated document. A scale is never produced by applying a percentage to last year’s — the LGA had to reissue a circular over exactly that kind of rounding error.
- Every rate carries provenance — source document, source URL, effective date, retrieved date — or it does not get published.
- Provisional is never shown as final. Anything still subject to consultation renders with a flag saying so.
- Nations are kept separate. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have different scales, different working weeks and different timetables. One nation’s figure is never used to fill another’s gap, and a missing award is shown as missing.
- A figure that cannot be shown honestly is not shown. Where a required deduction is not held, the answer is unavailable with the reason, not a number that looks complete.
Corrections and right of reply
Report a wrong figure to hello@workterms.co.uk. You do not need to know which of us is wrong — a disagreement with your payslip is worth sending either way.
- Reports are acknowledged, and a correction to a published figure is made promptly once verified, with the fix taking priority over the explanation.
- Corrections are logged in public at the corrections log — what was wrong, what it is now, and when it changed. Nothing is quietly edited away.
- A significant correction is marked on the page that carried the error, not only in the log.
- Any organisation or person given as a source, or characterised on a page, may ask for a reply to be published alongside it.
- Accessibility defects are treated as defects, not suggestions.
Fact, estimate and comment are labelled as themselves
A published rate is a fact and is sourced. A calculator output is an estimate, shown with its working and its assumptions. Anything that is judgement — what an award is likely to mean, why a timetable slipped — is written as judgement and attributed. These are never blended into one confident sentence.
Money content, and the line this site will not cross
Nothing here is financial, legal or employment advice, and nothing here is a personal recommendation. The site tells you what published terms say and what they compute to. It never tells you what to do about it.
- No page states or implies that an option is suitable for you, and none recommends an action.
- Work Terms is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and nothing on it is intended as a financial promotion under section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.
- Deducting a published pension contribution rate is arithmetic on a published table. Projecting what a pension will be worth is a different activity that engages the FCA perimeter, and this site does not do it.
- A disclaimer does not move a page outside that perimeter — output design does — so the rule is enforced in what the pages are allowed to say, not in small print at the bottom.
For a decision about your own money, pension or employment, use your employer’s payroll or pensions team, your union, or an appropriately qualified adviser.
Independence
Work Terms is independent of, and unaffiliated with, the NHS, any NHS body, any local authority, the Local Government Association, the National Joint Council, any trade union and any employer. No organisation reviews or approves a page before it is published, and none has ever been offered the chance to.
How the site is funded
The site currently carries no advertising, takes no sponsorship, and has no affiliate links. Nobody is paying for anything here to say what it says. If that changes, this paragraph changes with it — it is generated from the site’s own advertising setting rather than typed, so it cannot quietly go stale.
There is no sponsored content and no paid placement, and no figure, ranking or recommendation on this site is for sale. Were that ever to change, it would be disclosed on the page itself and labelled as the CAP Code requires, not mentioned only here.
How pages are made, and who is accountable
Every page is written and maintained by a named person — Rakesh Choudhary — whose name appears on it. Research and drafting tools may be used in preparing a page; where they are, it changes nothing about accountability. No page is published without human review, no figure reaches a page except through the sourced data described in the methodology, and responsibility for every word and every number rests with the named author.
Your data
Calculator inputs stay in your browser. A salary figure is never put into a URL, a log, an analytics event or a third-party request. The site is operated in line with UK GDPR and the PECR rules on storing anything on your device — privacy and cookies explain the reasoning rather than asserting the conclusion, so you can check it. You may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at any time.
Complaints
Write to hello@workterms.co.uk, with the page and what is wrong with it. Complaints are read by Rakesh Choudhary, who will respond and say what will be done. A complaint about a figure is handled as a correction and takes priority.
As above, there is no external appeal — no press regulator covers this site. Where a complaint concerns personal data you can go to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and where it concerns advertising, to the Advertising Standards Authority.