The standard
There’s no maintained accreditation standard in UK building.
We’re building one.
Eight independent checks. Annual re-verification. Public audit trail per builder. And the only economic model in this category that actually funds the standards work.
Our standard
Eight independent checks. Stored in the database as an enum, not a marketing list — a builder cannot earn a CB-XXXXX number without every check passing.
Companies House
Active company · no recent dissolution · no director disqualification.
Re-checked · Annually + on every status change
Public liability insurance
Minimum £2m cover. Certificate verified directly with the insurer.
Re-checked · On expiry · grace window 14 days
VAT registration
HMRC VAT lookup. Below-threshold builders declare exemption.
Re-checked · Annually
Trade-body membership
Gas Safe / TrustMark / NICEIC / FENSA / FMB / NHBC cross-checked against the body's published register.
Re-checked · Quarterly
Reputation & Trust Portfolio
Photo-verified portfolio, public reviews and every Compare Builders job rated by a verified homeowner.
Re-checked · Continuously — every completed job adds to it
Right to work — principal
Confirmed alongside the principal's photo-ID. Result recorded against the verification record, never published.
Re-checked · Annually + on principal change
Photo ID — principal
Government photo-ID + liveness check on the principal via an ID/AML verification provider.
Re-checked · On principal change
Financial standing
Commercial credit data read from the company number — CCJs, adverse credit and insolvency risk.
Re-checked · Annually + monitored for change events
How we maintain it
Accreditation is only as strong as what happens after the badge is issued. Four mechanisms keep ours honest, written into the code rather than the marketing.
Annual re-verification, scheduled
Every approved builder has a re-verification date set one year forward. Reminders fire at 30, 7 and 0 days. The public verification page flips red when the date passes. Not a discretionary review — a scheduled re-collection of every piece of evidence.
Document expiry monitored
Insurance certificates, trade-body memberships, VAT proof — every document with an expiry date is tracked against a 35-day lookahead window. The verification team gets a single queue with urgency buckets (red <7 days, amber 8–30, neutral 31+). Nothing decays unseen.
Suspension is a hard-gate
When a builder is suspended, the matching engine excludes them from every future auction immediately — one line of code, no soft flag, no waiting for the next cycle. Their public verification page also shows the suspended state with the reason and date.
Every change is publicly audited
Every status change, every reference-call outcome, every Companies House re-sync writes to an append-only audit log. A filtered, privacy-safe subset is visible on every public verification page. Anyone — a homeowner, a journalist, a competitor — can audit the trail.
Audit any builder yourself
Every accredited builder has a public CB-XXXXX number that resolves to a verification page showing every check, every status change, and every re-verification date. Indexable by search engines. No marketing fluff.
What lives on every verify page
- Status banner — Active, Suspended, or Not recognised.
- The verified badge — one standard, no tiers.
- Identity — registered + trading name, Companies House number.
- Eight-stage accreditation grid with verified-on dates.
- Insurance provider, cover amount, expiry.
- Trade-body memberships and trades covered.
- Verification history — every status change, time-stamped.
- Re-verification due date, with countdown banner if approaching.
For homeowners
Three steps. No cold calls.
Most platforms sell your number to whoever pays. We do the opposite — the right builders bid to reach you.
Tell us about your job
Seven short questions: project type, budget, timeline, location. Around ninety seconds — and we verify your mobile.
Builders bid for the lead
Verified builders in your area place sealed bids. They pay us to win the right to contact you — never the other way around.
The winner contacts you
Only one builder reaches you per auction. No spam, no chasing. Every builder is independently verifiable by their public ID.
For builders
Good tradespeople hate bad ones — the bad ones ruin everyone's reputation. The standard exists to protect good builders from being undercut by cowboys.
Free to apply
No charge to start the accreditation process. Membership from £49/month once verified, plus your winning bids. No charge for losing bids, no charge for cold leads that go nowhere.
Pre-qualified jobs
Every job in the auction pool has passed our scoring: real homeowner, real budget bracket, real project readiness, SMS- verified contact. Low-intent leads route to nurture, not the auction.
The standard protects you
You won’t bid against an uninsured cowboy who under-cuts because they cut corners. Every other builder in the auction has cleared the same eight checks you did. The standard is the floor.
Now you’ve read the standard
Start a project,
audit a builder.
Two ways to use the standard right now — submit your project or look up any verified builder by their CB number.