We started out publishing court records the public isn't normally allowed to see. We were the first organisation to privately obtain and publish court transcripts en masse, and the first to publish a full trial transcript in UK legal history.
The more of those records we read, the clearer it became that the failures in them weren't isolated. The same problems came up in case after case: demographic change, frontline services stretched past the point of function, institutions that cannot or will not act. Publishing more of it wasn't going to change any of that on its own, because the real question was why it kept happening in the first place.
That's the work we're moving into now. We're looking at why the justice system fails the people it's supposed to protect, what countries with better systems do differently, and how the same failures repeated themselves across so many towns. The transcript work carries on alongside all of this, because it's still where a lot of the evidence starts.
The name has changed and the remit is wider, but the reason we started this hasn't. We feel genuinely privileged to be able to do this work, and we're looking forward to what comes next.