How we check who owns a business

What is checked before a business is listed

There are three ways a business gets into the directory, and it is worth knowing which checks run on each, because it is fewer than most directories imply.

Someone submits it and we approve it. Anyone can submit a business through our form. The form requires a name and nothing else. The submission lands in an admin queue that shows the name, category, address, city, postcode, website, the submitter’s email, and their free-text answer to why they think it is independent. A person reads that and presses Approve or Reject. No automated check runs at that moment. Approving means “this looks like a real business worth listing”, which is not the same claim as “we have checked who owns it”, and the row is created unbadged and marked unverified.

We add it ourselves. An administrator can create or edit a listing directly. What is enforced there is shape rather than substance: the city has to be one we cover, the category one we use, the web address has to look like a web address, and the slug has to be unique. If the name matches our chain list, a warning appears next to the field. It does not stop the save.

It arrives from a map search. When our search runs out of listed businesses it can top up from Google Places, and those places get written into our database. Anything a signed-in reader adds this way is created hidden and unpublished, so it does not reach the public directory at all until a person moves it.

The one automated screen that runs across those paths is a list of about ninety well-known chain brand names, kept by hand in our code. If a name matches it, the row is flagged and kept out of the directory. That list is a name check. It reads a string of text and compares it with other strings of text. It does not look up a company, it does not read a filing, and it has never seen a PSC register. It catches Costa. It would not catch a private-equity rollup trading under a founder’s surname, and we would rather say that than let the list stand in for a check it is not.

What is checked before it is badged verified

A person looks the business up on Companies House, follows the persons-with-significant-control register to whoever actually controls it, and decides against our definition of independent: locally and privately owned, not a national or multinational chain, not a franchise, not owned by private equity. Outlet count is not the test. A local owner with three shops in one city still counts, because the ownership and the money stay local.

That is the entire process, and it is worth being precise about what it is not. It is not software. No part of our product reads Companies House. There is no ownership-checking service, no scheduled job, no queue that presents a business for verification and records the outcome. The badge is a column in a database that a person sets by hand once they have satisfied themselves in a browser tab, and our database keeps no company number, no check date and no reviewer’s name beside it. We are building the pipeline that would; it does not exist yet.

Lincoln, counted live: 87 businesses listed, 11 ownership-verified.

One consequence of doing it by hand is that it is slow, and the second number above is the honest measure of how slow. We would rather publish a small true number than a large implied one.

What listed without a badge means

In the directory, no badge means we have not checked that business’s ownership yet. It is not a suggestion that something is wrong with it. Most of the independents we list are almost certainly independent; they are simply waiting in a queue that moves at the speed of one person reading company filings.

In a search result, no badge can mean a second thing. Search ranks a mixed pool and will show you a chain, demoted and unbadged, because a search that quietly deleted chains would be lying about what is near you. So on a search result, an unbadged place is either an independent we have not checked or a business that is not an independent at all. The badge is the only positive claim we make. Its absence is not a claim in either direction.

What the check cannot catch

A business with no filing. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships do not register at Companies House. A good number of the shops on a street like the Bailgate are exactly that. There is no entity to look up, no PSC to follow, and we record it as no entity found rather than as independent. An absence from the register is not evidence of anything; it is equally consistent with a business we failed to find.

A tied pub. A pub can be run by a landlord who lives above it, on a lease that ties the beer, the rent and often the prices to a national pub company. The register may show a small local company with an individual in control, and that is true as far as it goes, while the economics point somewhere else entirely. This is why we have not published a pubs section for the Bailgate. A half-checked answer about a pub is worse than no answer.

A franchise trading under its own company. A franchisee is usually a local person with a local limited company and an individual PSC. The register shows exactly what an independent looks like. The franchise agreement, which is not a public document, is what makes the difference, and we cannot read it.

A change after we looked. Nothing re-checks a badge once it is set. If a business we verified in June was bought in August, our badge is out of date until somebody notices. There is no re-verification schedule in the product today.

A chain we have not heard of. The name list is added to reactively, usually after a chain has already appeared in somebody’s results. It is not a defence so much as a record of what has got past us.

If we have got something wrong

Email alex@digitalhighstreett.com and say which business and what is wrong. Being straight about what happens next: there is no report button on a listing and no ticket system behind it. The message goes to one inbox, a person reads it, and if you are right the record is corrected by hand. If you are telling us a business we badged is no longer independently owned, that is the most useful message we get, because it is the failure our own process cannot detect.

Questions

Highstreett uses AI tools in drafting and states so; ownership verification is done by hand against Companies House.

The definition of independent this page checks against, and the reasoning behind it, is set out on the Independent Business Index methodology page.