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No other scheme on this site requires you to publish what your customers think. TrustMark does, and trades tend to react to that with more anxiety than it deserves.

The anxiety assumes that published feedback is a risk to be managed. In practice it is closer to a mandatory version of the thing every good trade should already be doing, with the awkward part — asking — converted from an optional task into a scheme obligation.

That reframing matters because the single biggest failure in trade review collection is not bad reviews. It is no reviews: a competent firm with four ratings from three years ago, losing work to a mediocre competitor with sixty recent ones. Being obliged to collect feedback systematically fixes the problem most firms know they have and never get round to.

There is a second-order benefit worth naming. A feedback process that runs on every job, rather than only when you remember, produces a much more representative picture than one triggered by pleased customers. That sounds like a downside and is not: a rating of 4.7 across ninety jobs is more persuasive to a cautious buyer than a perfect five across six, because it reads as real.

The practical requirement is a routine — ask at handover, every time, through the same channel — and that is a process question rather than a marketing one.

There is one more thing the obligation quietly buys you, which is a reason to answer poor ratings rather than dread them. A visible reply that explains what happened and what you did about it is read by every subsequent customer, and it demonstrates something a five-star average cannot: that you deal with things when they go wrong. Cautious buyers — the ones spending real money on their home — are looking for exactly that signal, because they already know something will go wrong somewhere and what they are really choosing is who they want to be dealing with when it does.

The background check is what stops TrustMark being a logo anybody can buy, and it is the requirement trades ask about most nervously.

TrustMark checks with Trading Standards, and businesses with serious consumer complaints or trading standards actions may be refused. Note the wording — may, and serious. This is not a scheme that turns you away for a single unhappy customer or a dispute that went to a bad review. It is looking for a pattern, or for formal action.

Two practical points follow, and they matter to anybody who has had a difficult episode.

The first is that resolved matters read very differently from unresolved ones. A complaint that was investigated and settled, with a record of what happened, is a different thing from one that was ignored until it escalated. If you have something in your history, having your own account of it — dates, what was disputed, what you did — is worth assembling before you apply rather than being asked cold.

The second is that this cuts in your favour more than against it. The whole value of a consumer-facing register is that it excludes the firms that should be excluded. A scheme that admitted everybody would be worth nothing to the homeowner searching it, and therefore worth nothing to you for being on it. The check is the product.

If you are genuinely unsure how you would look, the sensible move is to ask your scheme operator before applying. They deal with the process constantly and can tell you whether what you are worried about is the kind of thing that matters.