What we will and will not tell you about the law #
- Where the rules live, and what the CMA says the duty is
- A summary of the list of banned practices
We will not summarise that list because the detail sits in guidance we have not read in full, and a half remembered summary of consumer protection law is worse than none.
The position, as far as we can establish it and as at 19 September 2026, sits across two CMA publications.
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Unfair commercial practices (CMA207) 4 April 2025
Relates to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Published on 4 April 2025 and last updated on 18 November 2025. It puts the duty on businesses that publish reviews to “meet your legal obligations” and to “understand what is prohibited by law”.
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Fake reviews (CMA208) April 2025
Separate guidance for businesses that publish reviews. Its page states that legislative changes introduced in April 2025 apply.
The operational problem, which is a different problem #
Set the law aside and look at what actually happens in a trade business. Reviews get asked for on the jobs where somebody remembered, which tends to mean the jobs that went unusually well, or the jobs finished on a quiet week. That produces two effects, and neither of them is the one the business wanted.
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Volume
You get a fraction of the reviews your work would have earned, because most of the asks never happened.
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Bias
Worse and less obvious. The sample is biased by your own mood at the time of asking, which means your public reputation is being selected by whoever was least busy that week.
It competes with everything else in the office too. The NOW Report 2026, run by Powered Now with Installer across 140 UK tradespeople and reported by PHAM News on 22 July 2026, put business admin covering quoting, invoicing and chasing at an average of 5 hours 20 minutes a week. A review request is the last item on a list that already has a deadline on it, so it is the one that drops.
Which parts run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Knowing a job has been completed and paid
- Knowing whether this customer has already been asked, which is a lookup
- Sending one request, once
- Noticing a review mentions a defect nobody reported, which is rules to detect and judgement to act
Needs a person
- Deciding whether to ask this particular customer
- Deciding what to offer, if anything, which has a legal question attached
- Responding to a bad review, and never anything else
The first of these is the one to protect.
A firm that asks every customer without a human deciding will, eventually, ask the customer whose ceiling came down, and the resulting review will cost more than fifty good ones gained.
The last line is the interesting one #
Reviews are also a defect reporting channel that most trade businesses do not read as one. When a customer mentions in passing that something has not worked properly since, that is information which never reached the office through any other route. Spotting it is mechanical. Acting on it is a call for somebody who knows the job.
That is the same shape as the rest of this section. Detection is rules, response is judgement. See getting paid for the version of that split on invoices, and following up a quote for the version at the other end of the job. If you want to count the hours first, the which tasks run on rules tool is the place to start.