How to Choose a Cleaning Company in Birmingham

You can vet a cleaning company in about ten minutes, and none of those ten minutes is spent reading reviews. Check that the company is registered and who runs it. Ask for the insurance schedule rather than a claim about insurance. Get the scope in writing instead of an hourly rate on its own. Find out whether the person who arrives is employed or self-employed. Those four answers tell you more than a page of five-star ratings, because none of them can be bought.

Is it a registered company, and how do you check?

Search the name or the number at Companies House, free, in under a minute. You get the incorporation date, the registered office, the directors, the filing history and any proposal to strike the company off. That last one matters. A company partway through being dissolved is not one to trust with a key to your house.

An unregistered business is not automatically worse. Sole trading is an ordinary structure and plenty of good cleaners work that way; the person is personally liable rather than a company, which changes who you pursue rather than whether you can. What should concern you is a mismatch: a site calling itself a limited company but giving no number, a number that resolves to a dissolved company, or a registered name in a completely different trade.

Applying that here, because the article would be worthless otherwise. Adefem Concepts Solutions Ltd, company number 16899886, incorporated on 9 December 2025. Put the number in and you will see the same registered office and the same director we would give you on the phone. That is the point of a public register. You should not have to take anybody’s word for it.

What should public liability insurance actually cover?

Public liability covers injury to a third party, or damage to their property, arising from the work. “We are insured” is a sentence, not evidence. Ask for the schedule, which any insured business can forward in seconds, and read four things off it: the insurer, the policy number, the expiry date and the limit of indemnity, normally stated in millions of pounds. A policy that lapsed last spring leaves the website sentence true in the present tense and useless to you.

Then ask the two follow-ups almost nobody asks. Does the policy respond to damage to the item or surface actually being worked on, rather than only to something nearby? And does it cover keys, including replacing locks if one is lost, which is usually a named extension rather than a given? Managing agents for the converted blocks in Edgbaston ask for the certificate as routine, and it is a habit worth borrowing for your own house.

Insurance for staff is a separate matter and not optional. Any business that employs someone must carry it under the compulsory insurance Act of 1969 and must make the certificate available. A genuine sole trader with no employees does not need it. Either answer is informative: a certificate, or a clear explanation that the person works alone.

Employed or self-employed, and why does it change who is liable?

Ask one question: who is my contract with? If the company employs its cleaners, it answers for the work, insures its staff, arranges cover when somebody is ill, and is the party its own insurer expects to hear from when something is damaged. If the business is an introduction agency, your contract may be with a self-employed cleaner while the agency takes a finding fee or a commission. Both models operate across the West Midlands and both are legitimate.

What moves is the liability. Under the agency model the insurance that matters is the cleaner’s own, so ask to see it rather than assuming the agency’s policy reaches the work. Cover for sickness becomes your problem. A complaint goes to an individual rather than into a process. The tell is usually the language: employers talk about their team and their training, agencies talk about matching and vetting.

What should a written quote contain?

A quote is a scope document with a number attached, and the number is the least interesting part. Two quotes for the same address can both be honest and far apart because one includes the oven and the internal glass and the other does not.

• The rooms or areas covered, and the tasks in each one
• What is specifically excluded: ovens, internal glass above the ground floor, carpets, lofts, clearance
• Whether it is a fixed price for the job or an hourly rate with an estimated number of hours
• Who supplies the materials, the equipment and the consumables
• How long the visit should take, and how the first visit differs from later ones
• How access works, and what happens if nobody is home
• Notice required to cancel or reschedule, in both directions

An hourly rate with no scope is not a quote, it is a rate. That is fine for open-ended work you will direct yourself. It is the wrong instrument for anything with a deadline and a standard attached, which is why end of tenancy cleaning should be scoped against the checklist rather than sold by the hour. And a fixed price for a deep clean, from somebody who has not asked about the kitchen or the number of bathrooms, is either padded or it will move on the day. That is where the hours are.

How do you read reviews, and spot the fake ones?

Read the three-star reviews first. Five stars usually means the job went normally, one star is often about something outside the company’s control, and the middle band is where people describe what actually happened. Then read the replies to the critical ones, because how a business behaves when it is unhappy with a customer is the closest thing to a preview you will get.

• A cluster of five-star reviews posted within days of each other, then months of silence
• Reviewers with a single review to their name and no history
• Text naming no service, no room, no date and no property type
• The same phrasing under different names
• A spotless record over years on a service where things occasionally go wrong
• A wave of glowing reviews immediately after one detailed negative one
• Testimonials on a company’s own site that cannot be traced to any independent platform

Volume is not quality either. A firm covering hundreds of properties accumulates more reviews than a careful small operation without being better at cleaning a bathroom. Fake reviews are unlawful under consumer protection law and the Competition and Markets Authority can act on them, but enforcement runs in months and you are booking somebody for next week. Weight what you can verify yourself more heavily. Nobody can purchase a filing history.

What if a company has few reviews, or none?

Then reviews can only tell you so much, and the company should say so plainly instead of manufacturing something. This one is new. It was incorporated on 9 December 2025, and its Google listing carries 12 reviews averaging 4.6, which is a start rather than a long track record. Writing a guide about vetting cleaning companies while quietly implying more than that would be self-defeating, and you would see through it in about four seconds.

So look at what exists from day one. The registration is verifiable by anybody. The insurance schedule is a document rather than a claim. The scope of the quote is written down and can be held against the result. The questions asked before quoting are revealing on their own: a company that wants to know how many bathrooms there are, whether the property will be occupied and whether the oven is in scope is measuring a job, while one that asks only for the number of bedrooms is guessing. And you can start small, which is also the sensible way to think about how often to book a cleaner before committing to a schedule.

The warning cuts the other way too. A business a few months old with a wall of glowing testimonials on its own site and nothing on any independent platform is a worse signal than no reviews at all. No reviews is a gap in the evidence. Reviews that arrived from nowhere are a claim about the evidence, and claims are what you are supposed to be testing.

Keys, access and background checks

Keys should be held against a reference number rather than an address, so a lost bunch is not a map to your house. There should be a signed record of who holds what, keys should come back when the arrangement ends without chasing, and a key safe code shared with a cleaner should be changed afterwards. Ask who else in the business has access, and what happens if the regular cleaner leaves.

Ask about background checks, and listen to the answer. A basic check from the Disclosure and Barring Service is available to anyone and shows unspent convictions. Standard and enhanced checks are only available for eligible roles, and domestic cleaning is not normally one of them, so a company advertising enhanced DBS checks on domestic cleaners is describing something unusual or something it has not done. Access, and whether you need to be home, is worth settling alongside the rest of the first visit.

Cancellation, complaints and what happens when something gets broken

Settle all three before booking, because afterwards you negotiate from a worse position. What notice is needed to cancel, and is it the same in both directions? Is a missed visit charged for? If the person who normally cleans is ill, is cover provided, and would you rather have a stranger in the house or a skipped week? Who handles a complaint, and what is the process rather than the sentiment?

On breakages, the mechanics are worth knowing. Most household breakages are worth less than a typical insurance excess, so a responsible company replaces the item and never troubles the insurer; the policy is there for the rare serious one. A business that answers a question about a broken lamp by saying it is insured has not thought about it. What you want to hear is that it gets reported the same day, photographed and dealt with directly.

What should you ask on the phone before booking?

• Are you a registered company, and what is the number?
• Can you email me the public liability schedule, and do you employ your cleaners?
• What exactly is included, and what is excluded?
• Is this a fixed price for the job, or a rate with an estimate of hours?
• How are keys held, and what happens to them if I cancel?
• What happens if something is damaged, and who do I speak to?

What is not worth paying for?

• A long lock-in contract for a domestic clean you could book visit by visit
• A criminal record check fee added to your bill, which is a cost of employing somebody rather than a cost of cleaning your house
• A large payment up front for routine domestic cleaning, where paying per visit is normal
• Premium eco or hypoallergenic packages where no product and no standard is named
• A deep clean repeated every few months, when a reset followed by scheduled regular visits holds the same standard for less over a year

That last one is a real risk on the rented terraces of Selly Oak and Kings Heath, where a household may need two different products in the same year and books the wrong one twice.

Run this list at everybody, and run it at us. The number is above and takes a minute to check, the insurance certificate is available on request, the scope goes in writing before anything starts, and you get a price and an estimated time before we begin rather than after. If the answers do not satisfy you, the list still works on the next company you call.

Domestic Cleaning in Birmingham: what we actually see

Cleaning in Birmingham is sold by four different kinds of business and they are not interchangeable. National franchises operating through a local licensee. Introduction agencies that match you with a self-employed cleaner and take a fee for it. Independent limited companies. Sole traders working alone. All four are legitimate, and they differ in who employs the person who turns up, who carries the insurance, and who you actually have a contract with. Very little of the marketing makes that clear.

The difference shows up in the areas we cover. On the rented terraces of Selly Oak and Kings Heath the job is usually scoped against a handover date and somebody else’s checklist, so a vague quote is a financial risk rather than an irritation. In Edgbaston, where much of the housing is converted houses and blocks, a managing agent asks for an insurance certificate before anyone is given a key to a communal entrance. The questions in this guide come out of those two situations, and they apply to us exactly as they apply to anybody else.

We do this work across Birmingham and the West Midlands. If you want the detail on how we do it and what it costs, see our domestic cleaning service, or read about the areas we cover it in most: Selly Oak, Edgbaston and Kings Heath.