Sources and method

Rules and processes

We use primary sources: legislation (legislation.gov.uk), GOV.UK and the devolved governments, the NHS, the Health and Safety Executive, the Environment Agency and its equivalents in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, police forces and coroner services, fire and rescue services, and the charities that provide the service described. Guidance from organisations such as MoneyHelper, Mind, Age UK and Shelter is used where it explains a rule in plain terms, and is named where used. Forum discussions are used only to learn what people ask, never as a source for a rule. We do not use cleaning firms’ blogs, affiliate sites or AI summaries as sources for rules.

Where something is local practice (one police force or council) rather than a national rule, the page says so. Where we could not find a clear answer, we say that too rather than guess.

Prices

The cost tools show prices that UK firms, cost guides and councils publish, each with the firm, the page date and whether VAT is included. We do not average them or build our own price model, because firms describe their jobs differently and some publish conflicting figures on the same site. What you see is the span of published prices for a job like yours, not a quote.

Local help by postcode

• The council for a postcode comes from postcodes.io, which uses the ONS Postcode Directory. The postcode is not stored.
• Links to each council’s own pages come from GOV.UK’s Local Links Manager, the dataset GOV.UK uses itself. We check every link and remove the ones that no longer load.
• The fire and rescue service for each area comes from the ONS lookup of local authority districts to fire authorities. Each service’s home fire safety visit page was checked by hand on 29 September 2026.

The clutter scale pictures

The pictures on the clutter scale were drawn for this site. They follow the idea of the Clutter Image Rating (Frost, Steketee, Tolin and Renaud, 2008), nine pictures per room from clear to full, but they are not the validated photographs, and the scale is not a diagnosis.

Corrections

If something is wrong or out of date, tell us. Each page shows the date it was last updated.