CIT Testing in Birmingham
How the service runs locally.
We provide Concealed Information Tests throughout Birmingham and the wider West Midlands. The examiner travels to the person being tested, either to a home address or to a private room arranged close by. Birmingham sits roughly in the middle of the country and is straightforward for us to reach from our Cheshire base.
A CIT tests whether a person's brain recognises one specific detail among several plausible alternatives, recorded with an EEG cap. It does not involve accusing questions. This page covers the Birmingham service; the CIT testing guide explains the method.
Areas We Cover
Coverage takes in the whole West Midlands county: Birmingham, Solihull, Sandwell, Dudley, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Coventry.
- Birmingham city centre
- Edgbaston
- Harborne
- Moseley
- Kings Heath
- Selly Oak
- Northfield
- Erdington
- Handsworth
- Sutton Coldfield
- Solihull
- West Bromwich
- Dudley
- Walsall
- Wolverhampton
We also travel to Coventry, Redditch, Tamworth and Lichfield. If your address is not listed, ask: the examiner comes to you, so the list is a guide and not a boundary.
Where the Test Takes Place
At home, or in a private room arranged near you.
Home visits are the norm in Birmingham. We need a quiet room with a table, a chair and a socket, and around ninety minutes. A dining room or spare room works well. Televisions, pets and other people should be kept out while the recording runs.
For workplace cases we do not recommend testing on the employer's premises. An employee should not feel observed by colleagues or managers. A neutral private meeting room, which we arrange, is the better setting.
What You Need Before Booking
The requirement is the same everywhere, and it is the one most cases fail.
A CIT needs at least one specific detail that the person would know only if they were involved, and that they have not been told, shown or asked about. A name, a place, an object or an amount can all work. A general suspicion cannot, because there is nothing in it to recognise. Two or three separate details make a stronger test than one.
The person to be tested must agree and gives written consent on the day. The full requirements, with a checklist, are on the who qualifies for a CIT test page. If no detail is known, read about the searching CIT and its limits before going further.
A Local Example of a Word List
Illustrative only. Real lists are written for each case.
Suppose the detail being tested is a place, and the true answer is Harborne. The person would see that item mixed in with five alternatives, Moseley, Erdington, Yardley, Bournville and Sheldon, and would be asked to press a different key whenever Northfield appeared. Each item is shown around thirty times in shuffled order.
In a workplace case the detail is more often an object or a location inside a building than a district, and the same rule applies: the storeroom, the cabinet or the vehicle is listed among alternatives that an uninvolved colleague would find equally unremarkable.
The step-by-step account of what happens next, from recording to result, is on the how CIT testing works page.
What the Test Can and Cannot Tell You
The same limits apply in Birmingham as anywhere else.
A CIT can show that a detail is recognised, or that there is no sign of recognition in a recording that passed its quality check. It cannot test a bare accusation, it cannot tell innocent knowledge from guilty knowledge, and it does not prove what a person did. People can also be taught techniques that weaken the test; research published in 2004 showed this for the protocol we use.
Published laboratory studies of P300-based CITs commonly report detection of 80 to 95 per cent of people who hold the tested information. Those are laboratory figures and are not results from our own testing, and field validation is limited. If you are weighing this against a conventional lie detector, the CIT test vs polygraph comparison sets out the differences, and relationship cases are covered on the page about CIT testing for a suspected cheating partner.
The Legal Position in Birmingham
What the law does and does not say.
Birmingham is in England, so the law of England and Wales applies. The polygraph has a statutory role there in supervising certain offenders on licence, with section 30 of the Offender Management Act 2007 keeping session results out of criminal proceedings against the person tested. The CIT has no statutory footing. It is a private, voluntary test and we make no claim of admissibility in any court or employment tribunal. Employers should take their own employment law advice before asking a member of staff to take part, and refusal must carry no penalty.
Booking a CIT Test in Birmingham
What happens after you get in touch.
You can book online or ask a question first. We will ask what happened, what the person to be tested has and has not been told, and who else knows. If a sound test can be built, we draft the word lists with you and then agree a date and place in Birmingham. If it cannot, we will say so before any appointment is made.