Checkatrade, Trustatrader and What a Directory Badge Actually Means

Checkatrade and Trustatrader are the same kind of thing

Both are subscription directories that sell listings to trades and reassurance to homeowners. A trade applies, submits documents, pays a membership fee, and appears on a profile that carries reviews and a badge. The differences between the two sit in the price of membership, in whether leads are charged for separately, and in the wording of the guarantee attached. The model underneath does not differ in any way that changes your decision.

A directory has two customers and only one of them pays it. You are the audience, the trade is the client. That is how every advertising funded listing has ever worked, but it does mean the product being sold is your confidence, and the seller has a commercial reason to present the vetting as more thorough than a documents check at a desk can be.

Neither has statutory power. Neither can stop a trade working, fine anybody or order a refund. The strongest sanction available is removal from its own website, which a member survives by getting listed somewhere else on Monday morning. Keep that in mind when you read the words vetted and monitored.

What does the vetting actually check

Paperwork, at the point of joining. In broad terms a directory verifies identity and the registered company, checks that a public liability insurance certificate is in date, runs a credit or insolvency check, takes references the applicant has supplied, and files copies of whatever trade certificates the member chooses to upload. It is a desk exercise carried out on documents, and it is carried out once, then refreshed on a cycle.

Every part of that is useful and every part has a soft edge. An insurance certificate proves a policy existed on the day it was scanned, not that it was renewed or that it covers the work being done at your address. References come from customers the applicant picked. A credit check tells you a business was solvent that month, and businesses go under between renewals.

The certificates are the part people most misread. A directory holds a photograph of a card, and the member decides which cards to send. Nothing in that tells you whether the person at your door is the one named on it, whether it has since expired, or whether the competence you need is on it. A business gets vetted. A person does the work.

• Identity of the applicant and the registered company or sole trader details.
• A public liability insurance certificate, valid on the day it is submitted.
• A credit, bankruptcy or insolvency check on the business.
• References supplied by the applicant, contacted by the directory.
• Copies of trade certificates and registration cards the member chooses to upload.
• A periodic recheck, usually annual, rather than continuous monitoring.

What directory vetting does not cover

Workmanship, pricing, diagnosis, and who actually turns up. No directory sends an inspector to look at a finished cylinder installation, a soldered joint in a floor void, or where the discharge pipework from a safety valve terminates. Nobody checks whether the quote bore any relationship to the fault. Those are the things that decide whether the job goes well.

It also does not match the qualification to the job in front of you. Gas work sits on a register anybody can search free by business number or postcode, and each registered engineer carries an ID card listing the categories they are signed off for. Stored hot water competence works the same way: a named person, a card, an expiry date. A badge is none of those.

And it says nothing about what happened after the check. A firm can be vetted in March, lose a competent engineer in June, take on agency labour in August and still show the same badge in November. The badge records a membership, not the business as it stands today.

For gas work, check the engineer on the official Gas Safe Register yourself and look at the card in their hand on the day. For stored hot water work, ask to see the individual competence card.

What does it cost a trade to be listed

A membership fee, usually annual or monthly and priced by trade and area, and on some plans a further charge for each lead or contact the listing produces. It is a genuine, recurring business cost. Like any other marketing cost it has to be recovered from the jobs that actually complete, because the ones that do not complete still cost money.

That last point is the one worth sitting with, because it is the same arithmetic that sits behind a paid search listing. Where a directory charges per lead, the trade pays when the phone rings. It pays for the tenant who cannot authorise work, the caller three boroughs outside the area, the person who wanted free advice on a dripping tap, and the enquiry that was never going to book. Every one of those has to be carried by the customers who do go ahead.

Nobody has to behave badly for that to bite. A high cost per acquired job makes a small repair barely worth attending and a replacement look comfortable, and that pressure reaches the conversation in your hallway long before anybody decides to be dishonest. The invoice is where a business recovers its numbers.

Can you trust the reviews on a trade directory

They are more controlled than open reviews and that cuts both ways. Feedback is usually tied to a job reported through the platform or to a customer the member invited, which makes outright fakes harder to post. It also gives the member real say over which customers are ever asked. A filtered sample is cleaner and more flattering.

It shows in the scores. When ratings across a directory cluster near the top, the number has stopped carrying information, and choosing between two trades on a tenth of a point is choosing on noise. Read the words instead. A review naming the fault, the test and the part came from a real job. A burst of short praise posted in the same fortnight tells you about a review request campaign.

Then look at how the business answers criticism, because that reply is written by the version of it you meet when something goes wrong. A reply that addresses the specific complaint is a good sign. One that disputes whether the person was ever a customer is not.

• Prefer reviews that name the job: the tundish that kept dripping, the immersion element in a flat, the leak traced under a screed floor.
• Check whether reviews are spread over years or clustered into a few weeks.
• Read the replies to the critical ones before you read anything else.
• Ignore the total count. Twenty specific reviews beat two hundred vague ones.
• Treat a score that almost every member achieves as a floor, not a recommendation.

What happens if the job goes wrong and you complain to the directory

You report it, the directory contacts the member, and somebody usually attempts to mediate. If that fails it can suspend or remove the listing. It cannot order the trade to return, order a refund, or enforce anything, because it has no power over a contract it is not party to. Your contract is with the trader, not the website that introduced you.

Where a guarantee is attached to a membership, read it as what it is: an insurance policy with a financial cap, exclusions, a reporting deadline and conditions about how you paid. Those policies pay out in specific circumstances, commonly where a member has ceased trading or failed to return, and generally not on a quality disagreement with a trader who is still in business. Find the policy document and read the cap before you rely on it.

Your real remedies are stronger than the badge and most people never use them. Under consumer law a service must be carried out with reasonable care and skill, and where it is not you can require the trader to put it right, or ask for a price reduction if they will not. Paying by credit card on work over one hundred pounds gives you a claim against the card provider as well as the trader. Written terms, a diagnosis you can repeat to somebody else, and a card payment are worth more than any logo.

Keep the paperwork. A quote splitting labour and parts, a note of what was tested and found, and a card receipt are the three documents that decide a dispute.

Is the badged business the business that turns up

Not always, and the directory does not promise that it will be. Membership is held by a company. The job can be passed to a self employed engineer, to a subcontractor, or to agency labour, and none of those people have been vetted by the directory or reviewed on the profile you read. You can be looking at an excellent listing and opening the door to somebody the listing has never heard of.

This is legal and ordinary, and plenty of firms subcontract properly. The objection is narrower: the reassurance you took was about a business, and somebody else is doing the work. The badge stops applying at the point where it would have mattered.

One question settles it. Ask whether the attending engineer is employed by the company you are speaking to. Somebody running their own team answers immediately, because it is their own payroll. A hedge is also an answer. Then check the trading name on the paperwork against the name you rang, because where those differ and nobody mentioned it, you have found the layer in the middle.

How much weight does a directory badge deserve

Treat it as a floor and nothing more. It gives reasonable confidence that a registered business exists, that somebody held an insurance certificate, and that the trade was solvent recently. That screens out the chancer with a magnetic sign and no company behind it, which is not a trivial filter on this trade. Accept it for that and stop.

Where it fails is that it answers none of the questions that decide your outcome. Will this person test before they quote. Do they carry the part that usually fails on a cylinder like yours. Will the price on the phone be the price on the invoice. Will the same firm return if the fault comes back. Membership has no bearing on any of it.

Here is the opinion, since you are entitled to one from somebody who does this work. Heavy reliance on a badge in a firm advertising is usually a sign that there is not much else to show. A business with good engineers talks about faults, tests and parts, because that is what it has. A business without them talks about logos, because logos are purchasable. When a website leads with badges and the engineer on the phone cannot tell you what they would check first, you have learned something real.

• A badge tells you a business exists, is insured on paper and pays a subscription.
• It does not tell you the attending individual is qualified for your specific job.
• It does not tell you the work will be inspected, because it will not be.
• It does not tell you the price is fair, and the membership cost has to be recovered somewhere.
• It does not survive a subcontracted job, which is where reassurance mattered most.

What to check instead, in the five minutes you actually have

Check the person, the price and the diagnosis, in that order. The engineer at your door should show a registration card carrying their own name, photograph, expiry date and the categories they are signed off for, and for gas you can search the official register yourself beforehand. That check attaches to a human being rather than to a subscription. Learning how to check a plumber on the Gas Safe Register takes about a minute, costs nothing, and settles a question no membership badge has ever answered.

Then pin the price down before anybody travels. Ask what the call-out charge covers and whether it is absorbed once work begins, what the rate is afterwards, and what you owe if you decide not to proceed that day. Get it in writing, by text if nothing else. A firm pricing its own work answers instantly.

Finally, describe the symptom on the phone and ask what they would test first. A real engineer names two or three plausible causes and says how they would separate them. That is the most reliable signal available to you, it takes thirty seconds, and no directory has ever measured it.

• Search the official Gas Safe Register yourself for gas work, by business number or postcode.
• Ask to see the individual competence card on arrival and check the expiry date and the categories.
• Ask who is attending and whether they are employed by the business you rang.
• Get the charging structure in writing before anybody gets in a van.
• Ask what you owe if you do not proceed after the diagnosis.
• Ask what they would test first, and listen to whether the answer is specific.
• Pay by credit card where the amount justifies it, and keep the quote and the receipt.

Why we do not ask you to judge us on a badge

Because the things that decide how your job goes are checkable directly, and we would rather you checked them. We run twenty engineers. The person who attends is ours, not a subcontractor found on a platform, and the rate is agreed with you before anybody travels rather than discovered on a doorstep. You can test each of those on the phone.

It also changes what happens afterwards. When the engineer who diagnosed the fault and the person answering the phone next week are on the same payroll, a return visit is a scheduling question rather than an argument between two companies about who pays for it.

Apply the same test to us that you would apply to anybody with a badge. Ask for the rate before the visit, ask for it in writing, and ask what happens to the price if the fault turns out to be something else. A business pricing the job answers all three straight away. A business pricing the customer cannot, because it has not met you yet.

None of this makes a directory useless. It makes it one input among several into how to find a good plumber, sitting alongside the official registers, a charging structure somebody will put in writing, and a phone call in which the engineer describes what they would test first. Treat the badge as the start of the shortlist rather than the end of the decision.

Our rate is agreed with you before we attend and published on our pricing page. Ask the same of anybody else, listed or not, before they set off.