The website looked the part. “Established, fully insured, over fifteen years serving South West London,” it announced, above a photograph of a smiling team in matching polos and a row of five-star reviews I had no way of tracing. I was on the verge of booking them for a deep clean when a small, cynical thought surfaced: how much of this is actually true, and how would I ever know? As it happens, a surprising amount of it is checkable, for free, in about the time it takes to boil a kettle. If a cleaning company trades as a limited company, its skeleton is a matter of public record, sitting on a government website most people have never once thought to open.

That website is Companies House, the official registrar of companies for the United Kingdom. Its public search tool is quietly one of the more useful things the state hands you for nothing. No account, no fee, no clever software. You type in a name and, within seconds, you are reading the same record a solicitor or a journalist would pull up. What follows is what to look at, what it tells you, and – just as importantly – what it does not, because a Companies House check is a sharp little habit that is also very easy to over-read.

First, the Catch: Not Every Cleaner Is On There

Before you start hunting, understand who actually appears on the register, because it is not everyone. Companies House holds records for limited companies, limited liability partnerships and a handful of related structures. It holds nothing at all on sole traders or ordinary partnerships – and a great many genuinely excellent cleaners across London work as sole traders, invoicing under their own name with no company behind them.

This matters enormously for how you read a blank result. If you search for a cleaner and find nothing, that is not automatically damning. It may simply mean they are a sole trader, which is a completely legitimate and common way to run a small cleaning round in Balham or Peckham. The picture changes the moment a business presents itself as a limited company. If the van says “Sparkle Homes Ltd” and the invoices say “Ltd” and the website talks about “the company,” then that “Ltd” is a specific, testable claim – and one that ought to appear on the register. A business trading on the credibility of limited-company status that cannot be found on Companies House at all is a genuine reason to slow down and ask questions.

Finding Them: The Free Search and the Company Number

The tool you want is the “Find and update company information” service on GOV.UK. Type the company name into the search box and you will usually get a list, because cleaning company names repeat endlessly and half of London seems to trade as some variation on “Crystal Clear.” This is where the company number earns its keep. Every registered company has a unique eight-character number that never changes, even if the business later renames itself, so if a cleaner gives you their number, or it appears in the small print of their website, use it to land on the right record with no guesswork.

Once you are on the company page, nearly everything worth knowing sits on a single screen or one click away, and it updates fast – Companies House processes most filings within about a day of accepting them. You are not looking at a dusty snapshot. You are looking at something close to live. The same page also lists the company’s registered nature of business as a SIC code, and a cleaning firm should carry a cleaning-related one – commonly 81210, the code for general cleaning of buildings. A self-described cleaning company whose only listed activity is something unrelated entirely is a small oddity, and small oddities are exactly what this exercise is for.

Is the Company Actually Alive, and As Old As It Claims?

Two things are worth checking almost immediately, and they take seconds each.

The first is status. Near the top of the record you will see whether the company is active, dissolved, or in liquidation, along with anything more ominous like a proposal to strike it off. Booking a deep clean from a company that is midway through being dissolved is not illegal, but it should give you pause, because it suggests an operation that is either winding down or in trouble. A live company will say “active” and nothing more dramatic.

The second is the incorporation date, and this is where marketing copy sometimes quietly parts company with reality. Remember the “over fifteen years serving South West London” line? The incorporation date tells you when the company was actually formed. If a firm trumpeting fifteen years of heritage turns out to have incorporated eight months ago, one of two innocent things may be true – they traded as a sole trader before incorporating, or they rebranded – but it is equally possible the heritage is invented. A brand-new company is not a bad thing in itself. A brand-new company pretending to be an old one is a different matter, and the date is right there in black and white.

Who Is Actually Behind It?

This is the part that repays a closer look, because a cleaning company is only ever as trustworthy as the people running it, and the register names them. Under the “people” or “officers” tab you will find the current and former directors, with the dates they were appointed and, in many cases, resigned. The person answering your emails is not always the person who owns and controls the business, and it can be quietly illuminating to see who actually does.

The phoenix pattern

There is one thing genuinely worth watching for, and Companies House lets you catch it. You can search by a person’s name and see every company they have been an officer of. Occasionally you will find a director sitting behind a trail of cleaning companies that were each incorporated, run for a year or two, then dissolved, with a fresh near-identical company springing up each time. This is sometimes called phoenixing, and while it is not always sinister, a pattern of dissolved cleaning ventures under the same name is exactly the sort of thing you would want to know before handing over your keys and a deposit. A single previous company means little. A graveyard of them means something.

Alongside the directors sits the register of people with significant control, the PSCs – broadly, anyone owning or controlling more than a quarter of the company. It is a free, public list of who really holds the reins, and it occasionally reveals that the friendly local firm is a small piece of something much larger.

The New Signal Almost Nobody Knows to Look For

Here is something that did not exist a year ago and that no cleaning advert will mention. Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, Companies House now requires the people running companies to prove who they are. Since 18 November 2025, identity verification has been mandatory for all newly appointed directors and PSCs, and every existing director must complete it by the time their company files its next confirmation statement, with the whole transition due to close on 18 November 2026. Officer records now carry a status showing whether that individual has verified their identity.

What this means for you, as someone hiring a cleaner, is that the register has started to tell you whether the people behind a company are who they say they are – something it could never confirm before. The register has grown teeth more generally, too: in a single recent year Companies House queried or removed inaccurate information relating to more than a hundred thousand companies. One honest caveat for 2026: because existing directors are still working through their deadlines, an “unverified” marker does not yet prove anything is wrong. As the transition closes, though, a verified status becomes a small but real reassurance, and its absence a fair thing to wonder about.

Filing History and the Registered Office

Two last details reward a glance. The filing history lists everything the company has submitted, and what you are checking for is simply whether it is up to date. A company that is badly overdue on its accounts or its confirmation statement is telling you something about how carefully it is being run, and carelessness with statutory paperwork does not always stay confined to the paperwork.

The registered office address is worth a look for a subtler reason. If a company presenting itself as a rooted local Wandsworth business has a registered office that turns out to be a formation agent’s address shared with three hundred other companies in a different city entirely, that does not make it a fraud – plenty of legitimate small firms use an accountant’s address – but it does complicate the cosy local-family-business image, and it is useful context to hold.

What This Does, and Does Not, Tell You

A Companies House check is one of the highest-value five minutes you can spend before letting a stranger into your home, and it is worth being clear-eyed about its limits all the same. It confirms that a company exists, how long it has, who runs it, whether it is solvent and current, and increasingly whether those people have proven their identity. It tells you nothing whatsoever about whether they will do a good job. A spotless filing record and a fully verified director does not guarantee your skirting boards will be touched, any more than a sole trader’s absence from the register means they will not do the finest clean of your life.

Think of it as a floor rather than a verdict. It quietly rules out the small number of outfits that are not what they claim to be – the dissolved company still taking bookings, the invented heritage, the serial phoenix – and lets you spend your actual judgement on the things a database will never capture. Which, when a stranger is about to have a key to your front door, is a rather sensible place to start.