"Verified" is one of the least informative words on the internet. It can mean a company number was typed in, or that somebody clicked a link in an email. So here is ours, in detail, including the parts that are weaker than you might assume.
What has to be true before a tradesperson can contact you
Identity, checked against a document and a live face rather than a form. Public liability insurance in force. The business itself confirmed to exist. And a human looking at the result: our admission decisions are never automatic, and a rejection is never made by software alone.
Public liability comes before contact, anywhere on the platform, whether or not we are sending the work. That was a deliberate tightening: it used to depend on whether we were routing the job.
The part that is genuinely stronger
Some credentials we do not take anybody's word for. Where a public register exists and permits it, we check the certificate against the register rather than against the photograph of it. An energy certificate is read from the official register. Those entries are marked as verified at source, and the marking means the register said so, not that we looked at a scan and were satisfied.
The part that is not
Several important trade registers have no public interface we are allowed to use. Gas Safe is the clearest case: we asked for access and were refused, so a Gas Safe registration on Tradelynx is checked by a person against the public lookup, and the entry says so rather than claiming more. Window and electrical competence schemes are the same today.
We would rather tell you which of our checks are machine-verified and which are a human reading a register, than describe both as "verified" and let you assume the stronger one.
What we do not check
Whether they are any good. Verification is about who somebody is and whether they are insured and entitled to trade. It says nothing about whether the work is tidy. That is what a job history is for, built up over time on the property itself, which is a slower and more honest signal than a badge.
If you want to read the gate in full rather than take this summary on trust, it is written out on the site, and every claim on this page is one we hold ourselves to with an automated check.