Gracchus is a public-interest data tracker. Every figure, every finding, every connection on the site points back to a source — usually a government record, a Parliamentary document, a National Audit Office report, a court ruling, or credible investigative journalism. If a claim does not have a source behind it, it does not belong here.
Sources come in three tiers. They show up as coloured chips next to every claim — click the chip to open the source document.
Primary sources are documents published by Parliament, the government, the courts or official regulators. ACOBA rulings, Committee on Standards reports, High Court judgments, National Audit Office investigations, Hansard. These carry the strongest evidentiary weight — regulators and judges have put their names to them, and quoting them is protected in law.
News sources are reported pieces from established outlets — Guardian, FT, BBC, Reuters, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Private Eye, Byline Times. Where a fact appears in reporting but has not yet been confirmed by a primary source, it is flagged as reported rather than established.
Analysis sources come from transparency NGOs and research institutes — Transparency International UK, the Institute for Government, Spotlight on Corruption, openDemocracy. Useful for context and pattern-spotting, treated as argued-from-evidence rather than adjudicated fact.
Every claim should carry at least one chip. The heavier the claim, the more sources behind it.
The three chip colours above are the public-facing tiers. Under the hood, every figure is graded on a four-grade scale, and the per-project source-quality score on Money Map is computed from those grades. The published rubric is in the repository at scripts/source-grading.md.
Independent auditors and bodies of record with a mandate to examine public spending. NAO, PAC, Hansard, Commons Library, IPA Major Projects Portfolio, MoD Major Projects Report, Audit Scotland / Wales / NI, court rulings (judiciary.uk / BAILII), legislation.gov.uk, named statutory inquiries (Post Office Horizon, Edinburgh Trams, Fraser). Good Law Project counts here only for judicial-review outcomes that have actually landed — not for advocacy posts.
Government and corporate primary sources from the buyer or the seller of the contract: gov.uk announcements, Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, Companies House filings, corporate investor relations.
Established outlets reporting from primary sources: Guardian, FT, BBC, Reuters, New Civil Engineer, Computer Weekly, Digital Health, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Private Eye, Byline Times.
Useful for context and pattern-spotting, but treated as argued-from-evidence rather than adjudicated fact. Wikipedia citations are accepted only when the underlying primary source is itself reachable from the article.
Where the rubric throws an entry into “U” (ungraded), it’s a flag for upgrade rather than a permanent grade. Verifier scripts run regularly to catch any U entries and resurface them for re-grading against a primary source.
Plenty of government contract figures are not public. Rather than guessing, Gracchus marks those as “Undisclosed” — dashed strokes on Money Map bubbles, blank cells in tables. If a number is there, it is a real published number. If the field is empty, the record exists but the figure has not been released.
Some connections point to firms or departments that are not in Gracchus’s core tracked set but sit one step away — Greensill Capital lobbying the Treasury for COVID loan access, for example. Those are flagged as “adjacent” rather than presented as direct. The connection is real; the relationship is just a little arms-length.
When a case is still being investigated or litigated, only findings already in the public record get reported. The card shows a “Live proceedings” banner. In practice that means no speculation, no inference of guilt, nothing beyond what the regulator or court has said in their own words. As proceedings move on, the record updates.
Anyone named on the site can respond. Email contact@gracchus.ai with “Right of reply” plus the name or topic in the subject line. Responses are read and considered. Where appropriate, the record is updated or a statement added alongside the original claim. Disagreements that cannot be resolved get recorded transparently so readers see both sides.
Corrections: contact@gracchus.ai
Editorial queries: contact@gracchus.ai
Right of reply: contact@gracchus.ai with the name or topic in the subject line