01
Policy-first gate
Your institution decides what to answer, refuse, or escalate — before retrieval.
Open source · Sovereign · Accountable
AI public services can actually govern.
Policy-first. Refusal-first. Glass-box. Answers only from your content — or an honest handover. Runs on your infrastructure with zero data egress.
Resident asks: “Can I get a discretionary housing payment while waiting for Universal Credit?”
CiviQ does not answer. It refuses and hands over.
✓ policy: escalate
✓ benefits decision support
✓ confidence below threshold
Handover → Housing Support · context attached
audit · sha256 4c8e…a2 · reason: policy:escalate
The differentiator
Refusal is a feature, not a failure.
A confident-wrong answer about benefits or safeguarding is institutional risk. CiviQ stops, explains, and hands over with context.
When it answers
“How do I book a bulky waste collection?”
That’s a bulky waste collection. Book on the council website and choose a date.
✓ grounded
✓ policy: answer
✓ self-check passed
Waste & recycling · Bulky collections
When it refuses
“Can I get a discretionary housing payment while waiting for UC?”
Does not answer. Refuses and hands over.
✓ policy: escalate
✓ low confidence
Handover → Housing Support
The problem
Information existing ≠ resident helped.
Booking bulk waste should take two minutes. It took thirty — hunting PDFs, second-guessing, nearly phoning a closed line. The facts were published. A trustworthy answer was not.
That gap fills contact centres and erodes trust.
What public services need
- → Correct, or honestly silent
- → Accountable for every answer
- → Data on the institution’s infrastructure
- → Accessible by default
None of that comes from a bigger model.
The category
Not another council chatbot.
Anyone can wire a model to a website. The commodity is the conversation. The value is the layer that decides whether to answer, proves every word, and records the decision.
The modelcommodity
Accountability · governance · intelligencethe moat
Your content & your policyyours
Capabilities
Six things. All built.
Not a roadmap — implemented in the open-source release.
02
Refusal-first
Answers only with supporting content. Refusal correctness is measured.
03
Glass-box evidence
Sources, confidence, policy checks. Hash-chained audit log.
04
Sovereign / zero-egress
Your infrastructure. Small local model or none. No cloud bill per message.
05
Omni-channel core
One governed engine for web, SMS, WhatsApp, voice — same accountability.
06
CiX intelligence
Every refusal becomes a ranked backlog of content gaps to fix next.
The thesis
Capability is a system property, not a model property.
A small sovereign model inside a strong accountability framework wins on correctness, governance, auditability, residency, and cost.
How it works
One governed lifecycle.
Every question travels the same path. Two gates can stop it cold. Every decision is recorded.
Technical architecture →01
Policy gate gate
Whether to engage at all
02
Skills + retrieval
Deterministic or hybrid search
03
Ground-or-refuse gate
Stop without real support
04
Generate + self-check
Draft from passages only
05
Refuse gate gate
Discard if checks fail
06
Cited answer or handover
With audit hash
Proof
Measured, not asserted.
Accuracy / refusal eval gate on every change.
15/15
Answerable correct
7/7
Correct refusals
3/3
Out-of-scope
0
Confident-wrong
Built & verified
- ✓ 228 automated tests
- ✓ Green accuracy / refusal gate
- ✓ Tamper-evident audit log
- ✓ GOV.UK Design System admin
- ✓ Docker + Helm install
- ✓ DPIA pack + threat model
Next
- ○ Design-partner council
- ○ External WCAG 2.2 AA
- ○ Signed DPIA + IG sign-off
- ○ Cyber Essentials
The real choice
Resolution rate ≠ accountability.
Managed chatbots optimise for deflection. Copilot deployments optimise for staff productivity. CiviQ is for institutions that must govern the answer.
| Capability | Managed chatbot | Cloud Copilot | CiviQ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cited from your content | Sometimes | If retrieval added | ✓ Always |
| Honest refusal | Rarely | Inconsistent | ✓ Core + measured |
| Policy before answering | None | None by default | ✓ First gate |
| Data residency | Vendor cloud | Vendor cloud | ✓ Zero egress |
| Audit trail | Limited | Provider logs | ✓ Tamper-evident |
| Lock-in | High | High | ✓ Apache-2.0 |
Next step
Run it, or talk pilot.
Open source and self-hostable. Clone it, point at your content, run on your infrastructure — or explore a design-partner pilot.