Editorial Policy

Guides are written and maintained by Daniel Whitmore, the site's founder, and checked before publication by Sarah Ellison, our paralegal reviewer. Sarah's name and review date appear at the top of every guide — the "last reviewed" line is a real event, not a decoration. When a page changes, the date changes with it; we never re-stamp a page whose content has not changed.

Primary sources only. For name-change and deed poll content that means GOV.UK's deed poll guidance, HM Passport Office and DVLA published requirements, and the legislation itself on legislation.gov.uk (for statutory declarations, the Statutory Declarations Act 1835). Fees and figures are taken from the official fee schedules at the date stated on the page. We do not source facts from other commercial deed poll sites, forums or AI-generated summaries.

If a page states a number — a court fee, a price, a processing time — that number came from an official source on a stated date. Where the honest answer is "it varies" or "we don't know", the page says exactly that rather than guessing. We would rather publish "check the current fee on gov.uk" than a figure we cannot stand behind. An invented number is a defect that outweighs a hundred useful pages, and our build checks treat stale or unsourced claims as failures, not style issues.

Our deed poll and statutory declaration templates reproduce settled, widely accepted wording — including the government model deed poll wording — character-for-character. The wording lives in a single source file in our codebase, and an automated test suite asserts on every build that the generated PDFs contain it verbatim. Statutory declarations follow the form prescribed by the Statutory Declarations Act 1835, with the jurat left blank for completion before an authorised witness, as the Act requires.

Four things: a change in the law or official guidance, a fee change in an official schedule, an error report from a reader, and our own periodic re-review of the oldest pages. Factual corrections are fixed promptly and recorded on our public corrections log with the date and what changed. Typos and clarifications that do not change meaning are fixed without a log entry. If you spot something wrong, email support@instantdeedpoll.co.uk — error reports go to the same reviewer who checks new pages.

Our own prices are stated plainly and are one-time payments — there are no subscriptions, upsells at checkout, countdown timers or pre-ticked boxes. When we compare routes (DIY free templates, other providers, solicitors), we state the competitor's price as published on their site at the review date and link the source. Where the free or official route is genuinely the best option for a situation — PE2/PE3 parking declarations, the gov.uk stat dec forms, changing a driving licence with the DVLA — we say so and link it, even though it earns us nothing.

Everything editorial. We sell our own documents; we do not sell rankings, recommendations, reviews, comparison outcomes or placement in any guide. No third party pays to appear anywhere on this site. There is no advertising and no affiliate linking. The only revenue is the document prices shown on the product pages. Our reviews page shows only genuine, verifiable customer feedback, and we do not mark up ratings in structured data until enough independently verifiable reviews exist.

We are a document service, not a law firm, and nothing on this site is legal advice. Guides cover the common cases well; complex situations — disputed parental responsibility, court orders, immigration constraints, gender recognition certificate interactions — may need a solicitor, and our pages say so at the point it matters. Content is written for England and Wales unless a page says otherwise; Scotland and Northern Ireland differ in places.

The most-read guides are re-checked against their sources at least quarterly, and every page is re-checked at least annually. Fee pages are re-checked whenever an official schedule changes. The review date at the top of each page is the date of its last genuine check — our sitemap, structured data and machine-readable feeds all derive from the same single date constant, so they can never disagree with the page you are reading.

You should verify, not trust. Every factual claim on this site links to, or names, the primary source it rests on — check us against GOV.UK and legislation.gov.uk directly. Our commercial interest is stated on every product page, our company details are in the footer of every page, our corrections are public, and our reviewers are named. Trust built on verifiable statements survives scrutiny; trust built on tone does not.

Instant Deed Poll is a trading name of Elite Digital AI Solutions Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (no. 17250017) — the legal entity named in the footer of every page and in our structured data. Editorial accountability sits with the named people on this page: Daniel Whitmore writes and maintains the content, and Sarah Ellison checks it. Commercial accountability sits with the company: the money-back acceptance guarantee, the refund policy and the privacy policy are company commitments, not marketing lines. If something goes wrong — a document refused on its wording, a factual error, a data concern — there is a named person and a registered company to hold to account, and a public corrections page where the record of fixes lives.