Editorial Standards: How a Fact Gets Past Us
Most of our readers meet us mid-decision: a boiler that died on the coldest morning of the year, a damp patch with opinions of its own, a quote for an extension that needs reading twice. Our UK Home & Property Guides are written for that moment, and this page explains what every one of them must survive before you see it. The short version: nothing appears here because somebody vaguely remembered it.
The life of a claim
Every guide is a stack of claims, and claims arrive in three kinds. Each kind has its own road in.
A price. British trade prices are local, seasonal and allergic to averages, so ours are ranges in pounds, each stating the year it was gathered, and each clear about VAT. A figure that quietly grows by a fifth at invoice stage is not a price, it is an ambush. Where the best available number comes from a trade body or industry survey we could not verify independently, the sentence names that source, so you know exactly whose number you are holding.
A rule. Whether a job needs building regulations approval, whether the person touching your gas boiler must be on the Gas Safe Register (they must; it is the law), what the Consumer Rights Act 2015 entitles you to when work is not done with reasonable care and skill: rules like these are verified against the current text of the law or the regulator's own publication, opened and read by us, never against a forum's memory of it.
A warning. Guides on rogue traders and deposit tricks exist to protect you, not to keep you up at night. Every warning sign we print is paired with its antidote: the register to check, the payment structure to refuse, the moment to close the front door, and the route to Trading Standards when it has already gone wrong. We do not name businesses as wrongdoers, and we do not publish suspicions we cannot verify.
Before any of it reaches you, the whole guide passes an independent fact-check, carried out by someone who did not write it, re-opening the sources and testing every number, name and date against what they actually say. No guide is small enough to skip the queue.
Four nations, four rulebooks
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland regulate homes differently: building rules, tenancy law and support schemes diverge, sometimes politely, sometimes completely. So when a guide states a rule, it says which nation it was verified for. A rule checked for England is labelled as England's, not passed off as Britain's. Where we have not verified your nation, the guide says so and points you at the official source that governs it, which is worth more than a confident guess about your side of the border.
What we will not print
No invented homeowners and no convenient anecdotes: if a guide quotes an experience, it came from a source we cite. No expert titles our team does not hold. Guides are researched, written and checked by our editorial team and signed Industry Oversight Editorial, because they are the work of a team, not a persona; where a decision genuinely needs a professional standing in your actual house, the guide says precisely that. And no bought warmth: firms covered in a guide do not pay for the coverage and do not see it before you do.
Dates that mean something
Every guide carries a dated "last verified" line, day first, the British way. The visible updated date moves only when the substance moved: a corrected fee, a changed regulation, a re-verified range. We do not nudge dates to look fresh.
When we get something wrong, we fix it in the guide itself, where the error lived, with a dated note. The same discipline applies when a source moves under us: official statistics are revised from time to time, the English Housing Survey issued a correction only this month, and when that happens the guides that leaned on the figure are re-checked and corrected at source too.
If you find the error first, use the contact page and name the guide and the claim. We will check it against the sources, and if you are right, the fix goes in with a dated note, and we will be quietly grateful.