How we vet providers: the register comes first

Every certificate in a landlord's file is only as good as the person who signed it — and UK compliance work has a feature most industries lack: statutory and recognised registers that make competence checkable in seconds. Our vetting model is built on that feature, in the least imaginative way possible: we check the registers, before anything else, for every provider, every trade.

Gas work means Gas Safe registration, verified against the official register with work categories matched to the jobs the provider will take — an engineer registered for boilers isn't thereby registered for fires, and our matching respects the categories, not just the card. Electrical inspection work means recognised qualifications and scheme membership of the kind that makes 'qualified and competent' checkable. Energy assessments mean current accreditation. Fire door and water-hygiene work, where the legal bar is competence rather than a single licence, means evidenced training and relevant experience — assessed, not assumed.

Insurance sits alongside registration as the second universal check, and paperwork standards form the third: providers commit to delivering the full artefact for their trade — gas records listing every appliance and flue, electrical reports with complete test schedules, door-by-door fire reports with photographs. A certificate that can't survive hostile reading isn't a deliverable we'll pass to a landlord.

Just as important is what disqualifies. Mandatory-sounding products that don't legally exist — the annual legionella certificate being the famous one — end the conversation. So does condemnation-led selling, teaser pricing that re-prices on the doorstep, and any casualness about dates on documents. Our pages teach landlords to spot these patterns; we can hardly teach the lesson and book the people who run them. The vetting bar and the editorial line are the same line, deliberately.

Verification isn't a launch-day ritual either: registrations lapse, categories change, insurance renews or doesn't — so our checks refresh on a cycle, with the register data that drives this site rebuilt regularly. Every page showing provider information is regenerated from current data, never hand-edited, which means a provider who falls out of verification falls off the pages too.

None of this is sophisticated. That's the point. The registers exist so nobody has to take competence on trust; a booking platform's job is to actually use them, every time, and to be boringly transparent about doing so. Register first, insurance second, paperwork third — then, and only then, a provider goes live, with their registration details attached to every job they take.

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