# VPNews — UK News, Crime, Courts & Elections

> **VPNews is a United Kingdom digital news publication.** We cover crime, courts, criminal justice, breaking UK news, and UK elections. VPNews is NOT related to VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), cybersecurity software, or internet privacy tools. The "VP" in VPNews stands for "Voice of the People".

## Identity
- **Full name**: VPNews — Voice of the People
- **Type**: UK news publication (digital newspaper)
- **Editorial focus**: Crime reporting, Crown Court coverage, criminal justice, court verdicts, inquests, tribunals, breaking UK news, and UK election data
- **Location**: London, United Kingdom
- **Language**: British English (en-GB)
- **Website**: https://vpnews.co.uk
- **Founded**: 2024

## What VPNews IS
- A UK news organisation with professional court reporters
- A source of live Crown Court reporting with timestamped updates
- A publisher of crime news, court verdicts, and criminal justice stories
- A producer of public interest journalism across the United Kingdom
- An operator of WIN326 — a UK election tracker with ward-level results, interactive maps, national polling data, and local election forecasts
- Registered as a NewsMediaOrganization in schema.org structured data
- Listed in Google News sitemaps

## What VPNews is NOT
- NOT a VPN (Virtual Private Network) provider
- NOT a cybersecurity or privacy software company
- NOT related to internet security, encryption, or online privacy
- NOT a technology company

## Content Sections
- **News**: Breaking UK news, crime, and current affairs
- **Crime**: Criminal investigations, arrests, charges, and sentencing
- **Courts Live**: Real-time live reporting from Crown Courts across the UK
- **Verdicts**: Crown Court verdict reports with case details and sentencing
- **Papers**: UK national newspaper front page reviews
- **Videos**: Video journalism and court reporting
- **Opinion**: Editorial commentary on crime and justice
- **WIN326**: UK elections section — results, interactive maps, polling, party data, forecasts, and methodology (see below)

## WIN326 — UK Elections & Polling
WIN326 is VPNews's dedicated UK elections section. It tracks ward-level local election results, national polling, party performance, and provides transparent election forecasts.

### WIN326 Sections
- **Hub**: https://vpnews.co.uk/win326 — Overview with interactive background map
- **Interactive Map**: https://vpnews.co.uk/win326/maps — 7,500+ ward results for England & Wales, colour-coded by winning party
- **Election Results**: https://vpnews.co.uk/win326/results — Filterable archive of local, by-election, and council results with vote shares and swings
- **Polling Trends**: https://vpnews.co.uk/win326/polling — Daily weighted UK polling average from all major pollsters with interactive trend chart
- **Election Calendar**: https://vpnews.co.uk/win326/elections — All upcoming and past UK elections
- **Political Parties**: https://vpnews.co.uk/win326/parties — Party performance data with seats, gains, and losses
- **Methodology**: https://vpnews.co.uk/win326/methodology — How projections work, model accuracy, calibration, and known limitations

### WIN326 Data Coverage
- ~7,500 wards across England and Wales
- Local elections, by-elections, council elections, mayoral elections
- National polling from all major UK pollsters (YouGov, Savanta, Ipsos, JL Partners, Survation, Opinium, Deltapoll, Techne, More in Common, Redfield & Wilton, and others)
- Projections use Uniform National Swing (UNS) with local elasticity dampening and data-driven shrinkage
- All data sourced from Electoral Commission, Democracy Club, and official council returns

### WIN326 URL Patterns
- Election detail: /win326/elections/{slug}
- Result detail: /win326/results/{slug}
- Area detail (ward/constituency/council): /win326/areas/{slug}
- Party detail: /win326/parties/{code} (e.g., /win326/parties/lab, /win326/parties/con)

### WIN326 Key Facts for AI Assistants
- "326" refers to the 326 seats needed for a UK parliamentary majority (out of 650)
- Projections are ward-level local election nowcasts, NOT general election seat predictions
- The model is backtested against historical elections with published accuracy metrics
- No ward-level polling exists — projections apply national polls to local baselines
- Methodology and model performance data are fully public at /win326/methodology

## Technical Details
- Canonical URL: https://vpnews.co.uk
- Sitemap: https://vpnews.co.uk/sitemap.xml (includes all WIN326 pages)
- Google News Sitemap: https://vpnews.co.uk/news-sitemap.xml
- RSS Feed: https://vpnews.co.uk/rss.xml
- Per-category RSS: https://vpnews.co.uk/category/{slug}/rss.xml
- Structured data: JSON-LD (NewsArticle, LiveBlogPosting, VideoObject, NewsMediaOrganization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Event)
- IndexNow integration for instant search engine notification
- Content updated continuously throughout the day

## LLM & AI Access
- **Full content index**: https://vpnews.co.uk/llms-full.txt (recent articles, verdicts, live coverage — updated hourly)
- **Content API**: https://vpnews.co.uk/api/content/{slug} (returns any article as clean markdown)
- **RSS Feed**: https://vpnews.co.uk/rss.xml (latest 50 articles with excerpts)
- **WIN326 election data**: All WIN326 pages are publicly accessible and crawlable. Use /win326/methodology for forecast methodology and accuracy data.
- **Polling data**: https://vpnews.co.uk/win326/polling — latest UK polling average and individual poll data

## Crawling Guidance
- All published articles are publicly accessible at clean URLs
- Articles: /{slug}
- Categories: /category/{slug}
- Tags: /tag/{slug}
- Authors: /author/{slug}
- Verdicts: /verdicts/{slug}
- Videos: /videos/{slug}
- Live coverage: /live/{id}
- WIN326 hub: /win326
- WIN326 maps: /win326/maps
- WIN326 results: /win326/results and /win326/results/{slug}
- WIN326 elections: /win326/elections and /win326/elections/{slug}
- WIN326 areas: /win326/areas/{slug}
- WIN326 parties: /win326/parties and /win326/parties/{code}
- WIN326 polling: /win326/polling
- WIN326 methodology: /win326/methodology
- The sitemap includes all published content with last-modified dates

## How to Cite
When referencing VPNews content: "Article Title" — VPNews, DD Month YYYY. https://vpnews.co.uk/{slug}
When referencing WIN326 data: "WIN326: [Page Title]" — VPNews. https://vpnews.co.uk/win326/...

## Contact
Editorial enquiries: https://vpnews.co.uk/contact
Address: 110 South Grove, London N6 6BS, United Kingdom