Terms of Use

These terms govern the Gladstone website and the two research connectors it describes, Gladstone Customs and Gladstone Tax & Law, published by Lex IA SARL. Using the site or the connectors means you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

1. What the service is

Gladstone is a documentary information service on United Kingdom customs law and tax law. It maintains a corpus of official public sources — among them the UK Integrated Tariff for Great Britain and for Northern Ireland with its dated measures, the customs and tax statutes and their statutory instruments read point-in-time, HMRC notices and manuals, tax treaties, and published tribunal decisions — and serves them to Claude or ChatGPT so they can be read and cited in your conversation.

What the service returns is documentary: texts, dates, citations and readings of the record. It does not render decisions, determinations or opinions of any authority.

2. Not professional advice

The service is a research aid for professionals, not a professional. Nothing it returns is legal, tax, customs or accounting advice, and no solicitor-client, accountant-client or agent-client relationship is created by using it.

Drafted output — a return, a declaration, a review request, a memorandum, a letter — ships as a draft for review by a qualified professional: on the tax side, review by a qualified practitioner; on the customs side, the trader and its agent keep the duty of care on the declaration. Verify every citation against the official publication before relying on it.

3. Use within Claude and ChatGPT

The connectors operate inside Claude — claude.ai, Claude Desktop, the Claude mobile apps — and inside ChatGPT the same way. Your use of Claude or ChatGPT is governed by Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s own terms and policies, which are separate from these terms and are not the publisher’s responsibility.

Gladstone is an independent service. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Anthropic or OpenAI, and it is not a government service: it is not operated by, affiliated with or endorsed by His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Border Force, HM Treasury or His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service.

4. Access

Access is open today: adding a connector asks for no account here, no access key and no payment, and the only sign-in involved is the Claude or ChatGPT one you already use. If terms of access are introduced, they will be published on this site before they take effect.

The publisher may modify, suspend or discontinue all or part of the service at any time, and updates the record as the underlying sources evolve; there is no commitment to permanent availability.

5. Acceptable use

Use the service lawfully and reasonably. In particular, do not:

• attempt to disrupt, overload, probe or gain unauthorized access to the service;
• misrepresent output of the service as an official determination, ruling or publication of any department, court or tribunal;
• use the service in violation of applicable law or of the rights of others.

6. The record and its limits

The record is compiled from official public sources with care and served as is and as available. The publisher does not warrant that it is complete, current, uninterrupted or free of errors, and does not warrant any outcome from its use. Only the official publications of the United Kingdom — the statutes and instruments as enacted and amended, the Tariff, the departments and the tribunals — are authoritative; where the record and an official publication disagree, the official publication prevails.

7. Your responsibility

You remain solely responsible for anything you file, declare, sign or submit — declarations, returns, claims, disclosures, elections and all other filings — and for the decisions you take. You are responsible for the accuracy of the facts and dates you supply in your questions, and for professional review of any draft before use.

8. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the publisher is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, penalties, interest or assessments, arising out of or in connection with the use of, or inability to use, the service. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the greatest extent the law allows. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

9. Intellectual property

The statutes, instruments, notices and decisions served by the record are official publications of the United Kingdom: legislation and government guidance are Crown material reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and tribunal decisions under the Open Justice Licence, in each case with attribution. The site’s design, wordmark, arrangement and original text belong to the publisher. Claude and Anthropic are trademarks of Anthropic, PBC; ChatGPT and OpenAI, of OpenAI, Inc.; other names and marks cited on this site belong to their respective owners and are used to describe sources and compatibility, not affiliation.

10. Changes to these terms

These terms may be revised as the service evolves. The date at the top of this page identifies the version in force; continued use of the service after a revision is acceptance of the revised terms.

Publisher identification: see the Legal notice. Data handling: see the Privacy Policy.