Trade licence

Home care and the trades under it are gated, which means a service in one of those categories goes live only after GoSavis has checked your trade licence and your public liability insurance. By trade licence we mean current registration with an accredited body for the regulated work you offer, in the name of the business or of the person who carries out the work for it.

Send the registration certificate or card that body issues, showing the name it is registered to, the registration number and the date it runs out. Where your work spans more than one regulated trade, send the registration that covers the work you are listing. A qualification certificate on its own, an insurance schedule or a trade association membership card is not registration with an accredited body, so it does not satisfy this on its own.

Registration is granted by the accredited body for the work, not by GoSavis. Gas Safe Register covers gas work, and gas work in Great Britain may only be carried out by a business on that register. NICEIC and NAPIT are among the bodies that register electrical contractors, OFTEC covers oil-fired heating, and WaterSafe lists approved plumbers. Each body sets its own conditions, its own assessment and its own renewal cycle, and each publishes a register you can be checked against.

If you are not registered yet, the body for your trade is the place to start; we cannot register you or hurry an application along. Until you hold one, you can still write your services in GoSavis Business and keep them as drafts.

Send it under Verification in GoSavis Business, where the certificates your categories ask for are listed with the state of each. Attach a PDF, JPG, PNG or WEBP file of up to 8 MB, and give the renewal date printed on the certificate before you attach it, because that is the date GoSavis holds you to. You can send a certificate before you have written a single service, so a business being set up can be checked while it works on the rest.

GoSavis checks the certificate itself before a service in a gated category goes live. While it is with us, the Verification page shows it as being checked, you can carry on writing the service and keep it as a draft, and we email you when there is an update. If we cannot approve what you send, we say why on the same page and you can send a corrected certificate from there.

GoSavis records the renewal date you give and counts the certificate as in force up to and including that day. We tell you about a month before it runs out, again about a week before, and once more the day after it has, each time in GoSavis Business and by email. Once it has run out, it no longer satisfies the requirement and a service in that category cannot be published until a current certificate has been checked. Send the new one from the same page and choose Send a renewal; a service that is already live is not taken down by the date alone.

GoSavis does not arrange, endorse or advise on any of these, and holding one is not a recommendation by us. What we do is check that the business trading on GoSavis in a category that requires one holds it, and that it is still in force.