Admission criteria
Checked before publication and rechecked every twelve months.
- Registered company name and company number, verifiable in the public register.
- A trading address and a year of incorporation.
- A description of services offered, written without superlatives and without claims we would have to verify.
- A named contact with a job title.
- For a testing laboratory or a certification body, the accreditation body and accreditation number, with the scope it covers. Where the accreditation is held with UKAS, the UKAS accreditation number is published in the entry.
- Written agreement to these standards, including the acknowledgement that payment buys nothing editorial.
Rates
- Standard register entry: 420 pounds for twelve months.
- Additional service category on the same entry: 140 pounds for twelve months.
- Newsletter sponsor line: see the newsletter rate card.
These are the prices set by the publisher of this title. They are the only monetary figures published anywhere on this site, because everything else we would have to invent.
What the money cannot buy
- Position. The register is alphabetical and the order does not move.
- Any mention in an article, ever.
- Any link from editorial content. There are no commercial links in any article on this site.
- Any influence on a legal status verdict in a shelf edge block. That verdict follows the law and the published schemes, and nothing else.
- Sight of anything before it is published.
- A veto, a right of pre-publication reply, or a right to have accurate material removed.
- A badge, a seal, a score or an endorsement of any kind.
- An undertaking that we will not write about the category the business operates in.
What we will not list at any price
Published so that it can be held against us.
- Any business whose entry we cannot verify against a public record.
- Any business asking for a position, a ranking, a badge or any form of prominence.
- Any business making the payment conditional on editorial treatment, including a request that we cover, or avoid covering, a subject.
- Any business offering to supply content, a guest article, or a link exchange.
- Any operator selling certification marks, seals or trust badges that are not backed by an audited standard, since the entire subject of this publication is what stands behind a mark.
- Any business offering to write, buy, incentivise or manage consumer reviews, which is now a banned practice in UK consumer law as well as being the opposite of what we are for.
- Any business marketing a food, supplement or product directly to consumers on a health basis, because we are not equipped to verify a health claim and will not lend a page to one.
Refusal and refunds
Where an application is refused, the fee is returned in full. Where an entry is removed because a verified fact has ceased to be true and has not been corrected, the balance of the term is returned pro rata.