Without breaching rights under Data Protection Act legislation and the Enterprise Act 2002, we use local and national databases to carry out the following checks on any applicant:
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we confirm the business is based in Derbyshire (or does a significant amount of its work in the county)
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we make sure the business deals with customers who are ordinary members of the public - businesses who trade exclusively with other businesses are not eligible to join
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we check the business has been trading for a minimum of 6 months or has a trading history with a previous business that we can verify
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we check previous history to see if there have been any trading standards complaints about the business in the past 2 years - any complaints are carefully assessed to see whether the applicant is suitable to join
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we check the name, home address and date of birth of all of the people involved in running the business:
- if the applicant is a sole trader or in a business partnership we check the people involved live at the addresses they've given us
- if the applicant is a limited company we check the information they’ve given us matches the records kept by Companies House
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if the business claims to hold any professional registrations or memberships such as the Federation of Master Builders or FENSA we check with the relevant organisation to make sure the registrations are current and the claims are factually correct
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if the business claims to carry out gas or electrical work we check they have the required legal accreditations (Gas Safe and Part P of the Building Regulations)
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we make sure the business has current public liability insurance
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we require the business to disclose any civil court judgements and previous convictions - they must also tell us about current legal proceedings which may be underway
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we check the County Court Judgements registry to make sure anyone involved in the business has not been sued and then failed to pay the amount awarded against them
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if the applicant has a website we check it complies with legal requirements and doesn’t make any misleading claims about the business
All applicants must agree to abide by our code of practice and accept responsibility for any sub-contractors that they use.
As a general rule we find that only good businesses apply to become Trusted Traders. Even so, around 10% of applicants have been refused membership because they've failed one or more of our checks.
Once membership is granted, we continually monitor customer complaints and feedback to try to make sure that all our Trusted Traders are maintaining the standards of the scheme.