Who can review
You need an account, which takes an email address and a sign-in link. One account can hold one live review of any one business. A review must describe your own first-hand experience of that business, and should carry enough detail to be worth another reader’s time.
You do not have to prove you bought anything. This directory sells nothing and arranges nothing, so there is no receipt for us to check against, and refusing reviews from people who cannot produce one would silence the visitor who was given the meal, sent to the tradesman by a neighbour, or turned away at the door.
You must not review a business you own, work for, act for, compete with, or have any other interest in, unless that interest is stated plainly in the review itself.
A review is not a complaint, and we will not swap one for the other
These are two different things and you are entitled to either, both, or neither.
A review is written for other readers and is meant to be published. A complaint is made to the business and is meant to get something fixed. Nobody has to complain first, and nothing on this site asks you to.
So that this is unambiguous:
- We will not suggest you take a complaint to the business instead of leaving a review, and we will not hold a review back while you do.
- We will not ask you to withdraw or soften a review because the business has since put the problem right. If you want to write a different review once it is resolved, email editorial@bcpdirectory.com and we will withdraw the one you have so you can write a new one. That is your decision, and we will not raise it.
- We will never treat a negative review as though it were a complaint, pass it to the business and leave it unpublished. A review submitted for publication is either published or rejected under this policy, and if it is rejected we say why.
- A business asking us to take a review down is not a reason to take it down. Businesses reply to reviews here; they do not remove them.
If you do want the business to fix something, contact the business. Its details are on its listing page.
What we reject
- Reviews written by owners, staff, family, agencies or competitors with an interest they have not stated
- Fabricated experiences, whether flattering or damaging: an invented five-star review and an invented one-star review are the same offence
- Copied text, spam, and reviews arranged in batches by anybody
- Reviews written or paid for by a third party on a business’s behalf
- Threats, hate, harassment, or personal information about anyone
- Serious allegations stated as fact that we have no responsible way to publish
- Anything about a different business, or about a delivery firm, a booking site or a council rather than the business listed
Rejecting a review is not a favour to the business it concerns. We reject fake praise more often than anything else.
Incentives
You may review a business that gave you something, and you must say so. The review form carries a box for it, and a review submitted with that box ticked is published carrying the line “Reviewer disclosed an incentive.” so readers can weigh it.
A discount, a free item, a prize entry, a voucher, a refund or anything else of value counts. An incentive that is hidden makes the review a banned practice in law, not merely against this policy.
A business must never make an incentive conditional on a good rating, on a rating at all, or on leaving the review on this site rather than another. A business must not offer anything for the removal of a review.
Moderation
Nothing appears when you press submit. Every review waits for a person to read it, and only then is it published or rejected. We aim to decide within three working days.
A review that has not been approved counts for nothing: it is not shown, and it does not move the rating or the review count on the listing.
Negative reviews are read to the same standard as positive ones and no other. A review is not held back for being unflattering, being about a business that pays us, or being about our own listing.
Reporting a review
Every published review carries a report link, open to readers and to the business alike, and you do not need an account to use it. The reasons offered are spam or a fake review, abusive content, a conflict of interest, personal information, and other. A hidden incentive goes under other, with what you know written in the details box. Add whatever detail you have; it is what we work from.
A report asks us to look. It does not take a review down, and the number of reports a review attracts does not decide anything. Reporting the same review repeatedly changes nothing except that we read your first report again.
How we investigate
We may ask the reviewer, the business, or both for something that helps settle it: when the visit happened, an order or job number, a photograph, an email trail. We give whoever we asked seven days to answer, and we decide on what we have if nobody does.
While we are looking into a published review we may withhold it. A withheld review stops counting towards the rating until we decide, so an unresolved question cannot flatter or damage a business in the meantime. Withholding is not a finding, and we put it back if the review turns out to be genuine.
We will not remove a genuine review because a business disputes the reviewer’s account of what happened. If the facts are contested and we cannot settle them, the review stays and the business is welcome to reply to it publicly.
What happens to a reviewer who plants a review
Where we conclude a review is fake, planted, or hides an incentive, we act against the account behind it, not only the review. What we do depends on what happened and on whether it has happened before.
- The review is removed and the business’s rating and review count are recalculated without it
- A first, isolated case gets a written warning to the account
- A deliberate or repeated case ends the account, and we decline a new one from the same person
- Where an account has planted one review we look at the rest of its reviews, and remove them all if the pattern holds
- We keep a record of every action taken, so a second occurrence is dealt with as a second occurrence
What happens to a business that benefited from one
A business does not keep the benefit of a review it arranged, and the sanction does not stop at deleting the review.
- Every review we conclude was planted for the business is removed and its rating recalculated
- Where a business arranged reviews as a course of conduct rather than once, we remove all of the reviews on its listing and it starts again from nothing
- Any paid placement is withdrawn and the plan ended, with no refund of the period already sold. Paid placement is a labelled slot; it is not a shield
- The account of anyone at the business who took part is dealt with as a reviewer under the section above
- A business found to have done it repeatedly may lose its claim on the listing, and we may decline a future claim. The listing itself stays, because it is a public record of a local business and removing it would punish the reader
- We report systematic breaches to the Competition and Markets Authority
A business that asks its customers for honest reviews is doing nothing wrong. None of the above is aimed at that.
Ratings
Only approved reviews written on this site count towards the BCP Directory rating. Ratings from Google or any other service are never blended into that score, and we import no reviews from anywhere. A food hygiene rating is a council inspection result and is kept out of it entirely.
Paid placement has no effect on a rating, and no effect on where a business appears in ordinary results. That is set out on our advertising page.
If you think a review defames you
This is a narrower route than reporting a review, and it is a legal one. Section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 and the Defamation (Operators of Websites) Regulations 2013 give a person who is defamed by something another person posted a procedure that runs to a fixed timetable, and we operate it.
Send a notice of complaint to editorial@bcpdirectory.com. To be a notice of complaint under section 5(6) it must give your name, set out the words complained of and explain why they are defamatory of you, and say where on this site they appear. Then:
- We acknowledge it within 48 hours
- Within 48 hours we pass it to the reviewer, with your address removed if you ask, and tell them the review may be removed unless they respond by the fifth day after we send it
- If they do not respond in time, ask for it to be removed, or cannot be contacted, we remove it and tell you
- If they want it to stay, they must give us their full name and postal address. We do not pass those to you without their consent or a court order, and we tell you that is the position
A business disagreeing with a review is not a notice of complaint, and this procedure is not a way around the rest of this page. Use the report link for that.
The law this policy works to
Paragraph 13 of Schedule 20 to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, in force since 6 April 2025, bans submitting or commissioning fake and concealed-incentivised reviews, publishing reviews in a misleading way, and publishing reviews without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to keep the banned ones out and take them down. We hold a written assessment of where those reviews could realistically come from on this site and what we do about each route, and we revisit it as the directory grows.
Something on this page not matching what the site does is worth telling us about. Email editorial@bcpdirectory.com, or read our editorial standards and terms of use.