Guidelines and reviews policy

• Be honest. Describe yourself, your business, your property and the work accurately. Do not claim what you cannot back up.
• Be civil. Disagree if you need to, but no abuse, threats, intimidation or harassment, in messages or in person.
• Treat everyone equally. Refusing to work with someone, or refusing to hire someone, because of a protected characteristic is unlawful and ends your use of the service.
• Keep to the job. Use the site, and the details you learn on it, only for the cleaning you are discussing. No marketing, no recruiting, no selling anything else.
• Respect privacy. Do not share another person’s name, address, phone number, photographs or messages outside the site without their agreement.
• Keep it safe. Say what a cleaner needs to know about a property. Do not ask a cleaner to do anything dangerous or unlawful. Cleaners: work safely and within the law.
• Be reliable. Turn up when you said you would, or say as early as you can that you cannot. Both sides.

• Anything unlawful, defamatory, obscene, hateful or discriminatory.
• Anything you do not have the right to post, including other people’s photographs.
• Contact details or links in a job post or on a page intended to take conversations off the site before a conversation exists.
• Jobs that are not genuine, or that are for anything other than cleaning.
• Prices, qualifications, checks, memberships or insurance you do not actually have.
• Words on our blocked list. The site rejects them when you save; if something innocent is caught, tell us and a person will look.

Who can review. Only a customer who hired a cleaner through the site and marked the job as finished. One review per job. Nobody else, including us, can write one.

What a review is. The customer’s honest opinion of the work they received. It can be critical. A cleaner cannot edit or remove it, and neither do we, except under this policy.

We remove a review that:

• was not written by the customer who had the clean, or is about a job that did not happen;
• was paid for, exchanged for a discount or a benefit, or written under pressure, whether positive or negative;
• contains abuse, threats, discrimination, or private information such as a phone number or address;
• is about something other than the cleaning, such as a dispute over an unrelated matter;
• is defamatory, or which a court or a lawful notice requires us to remove.

Fake reviews are unlawful. Writing, buying, offering or arranging a fake review, or suppressing a genuine one, is a criminal offence in the United Kingdom under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. We remove the reviews, close the accounts involved and may report the matter.

Testimonials from elsewhere. A cleaner may add quotes from customers who did not book through the site. They appear labelled as unverified and never count toward the rating. They must be real statements by real customers.

Disputing a review. If you are a cleaner and believe a review breaks this policy, report it from your dashboard and say why. A person reads the review, the conversation it relates to, and your reasons, and replies within ten working days. We do not remove a review because it is unfavourable.

Every cleaner page and every conversation has a report button. Use it to tell us about a page, a job, a message or a person that breaks these guidelines, and say what happened. You can also block another user from a conversation, which stops them contacting you through the site.

Reports go to a person, not to an automated system. We may look at the conversation and the accounts involved. We do not tell the other person who reported them. If someone is in danger, call the police first.

Depending on what happened and whether it has happened before, we may:

1. remove or hide the content and tell the person why;
2. warn the person and note it on the account;
3. restrict what the account can do, such as posting or applying;
4. suspend the account while we investigate;
5. close the account, and refuse a new one.

We tell people what we decided and why, except where the law prevents it or it would put someone at risk. Anyone we act against can reply and ask us to look again; a different person reviews it where we can arrange that.

A dispute about the work, the price, damage or a cancellation is between the customer and the cleaner: see the customer terms and the cleaner terms. We are not a party to the cleaning agreement and we do not arbitrate. What we can do is give either of you a copy of the conversation on request, act on a breach of these guidelines, and point you to the Citizens Advice consumer service, a cleaner’s insurer where they have one, or the small claims track of the county court.

To report something you cannot report from the site, or to complain about a decision we made, email support@maidmatcher.co.uk. A person acknowledges within five working days.