Editorial policy
This page describes how content on Spinborough House actually gets made — the research standard, the line between fact and opinion, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Facts are verified or omitted
Any factual claim about an operator's licensing is checked against the UK Gambling Commission's public register before it is published: the licensee's legal name, the account number, the licence status and the registered domain. Regulatory history — fines, settlements, warnings — is sourced from the Commission's own publications or reporting that cites them. Where we could not verify something to that standard, the site simply does not say it. You will find no invented player counts, no fabricated testimonials, and no statistics we cannot trace to a source.
Opinion is labelled by its nature
Star ratings, rankings and verdicts are editorial judgements, made using the criteria published on the how we rate page. They belong to this publication alone. They are not certifications, not regulatory endorsements, and not predictions of how your own experience will go. Where a review mixes fact and assessment — "licensed since 2014" beside "feels like the second child next to the sportsbook" — the sentence structure should always make obvious which is which. If it ever doesn't, that is a defect worth reporting.
Commercial relationships and the wall
The site earns affiliate commission, as described plainly in the affiliate disclosure. The rules that keep this from contaminating the content are short and absolute: no operator sees a review before publication; no operator can pay for a score, a position or the softening of a caveat; and negative findings stay published. An operator unhappy with its review has exactly one lever available — improving the things the review criticises.
What we will not publish
- Casinos without a current UK Gambling Commission licence, in any context that could send a reader there.
- Promotional claims we cannot verify against the operator's current published terms.
- Content that presents gambling as an income, an investment, or a solution to any problem.
- Anything aimed at, styled for, or likely to appeal particularly to under-18s.
- Urgency theatre — countdowns, "last chance" framing, or manufactured scarcity around gambling decisions.
Review and refresh
Licence details carry the date they were last checked, printed in the footer of every page. Reviews are revisited when something material changes: enforcement action, a change of licensee or platform, or credible reader reports. We do not pretend to a fixed re-review calendar we could not honour; instead, anything dated on this site shows a real date, and material updates are noted where they happen.
Corrections
When we are wrong, we fix the error at the source, promptly and without fuss, and materially significant corrections are acknowledged on the affected page. The process — what to send and what happens next — lives on the corrections page. Silent rewriting of substantive mistakes is against policy; typo fixes and formatting tidy-ups happen without ceremony.
Safer gambling is an editorial constraint, not a footer
Every page of this site is written on the assumption that some readers are vulnerable, whether or not they know it yet. That shapes the copy: no glamorising, no loss-chasing framing, and signposting to GambleAware, GamCare and GAMSTOP wherever a reader in difficulty might actually be looking. If any sentence on this site reads to you like encouragement to gamble beyond your means, we want to know about it as urgently as a factual error.