How to check a cleaning company is licensed

This takes about a minute and almost nobody does it, which is a shame, because it is the only check on this list you can complete without speaking to anybody.

The register is public

In Singapore the National Environment Agency licenses cleaning businesses, and the list is public. You can look any company up yourself on the NEA list of licensed cleaning businesses. Note the wording: NEA licenses, it does not certify. A company describing itself as “NEA certified” has the phrasing wrong, which does not by itself mean it is unlicensed, but it does mean nobody checked.

Look the company up yourself rather than taking a claim from a website, including ours. A licence number in a footer is a string of characters until somebody checks it against the list.

Check the name you were given

Businesses are listed under their registered name, which is not always the name on the van or the website. If you cannot find a company, ask them for the exact registered name and the UEN and look again before you conclude anything.

Spelling matters too. A register entry can differ from how a company writes its own name, so search on part of the name rather than the whole string.

What the register does not tell you

• Whether they are any good. It is a licensing list, not a quality rating.
• Whether they do your kind of work. Biohazard remediation, hoarding clearance and office cleaning are very different jobs.
• How they dispose of waste, which you have to ask about directly.
• Who will actually turn up, which is worth asking where the work is sensitive.

The three questions that sort the rest

Ask how the waste is disposed of, whether anybody attends in person before quoting, and what happens if the odour comes back. Plain answers to all three is the test. Hesitation on any of them tells you more than a website does.

A company that has thought about where the waste goes will answer immediately. A company that has not will talk about something else.

Be careful with the word certified

It appears on a lot of Singapore cleaning websites and it is the wrong word for what NEA does. It is not proof of anything either way, but it does tell you the claim was written without checking, which is worth knowing before you hand somebody your keys.

There is more on that in NEA licenses cleaning businesses, it does not certify them, and a fuller list in questions to ask before you hire.

Check who you are actually dealing with

Beyond the register, a few minutes tells you whether a company is a company.

• Is there a registered name and a UEN anywhere, or only a phone number and a chat account.
• Does the same business name appear on the website, the quote and the payment details. If payment goes to a name you have not seen, ask why before you send anything.
• Is there a fixed contact that exists independently of one mobile number.
• Will they put the scope in writing before the work rather than after it.

None of this is unusual to ask and none of it is rude. A company that finds it offensive has told you something useful.

Reviews, and what they are worth here

Less than in most trades. Families who have used a company for this kind of work overwhelmingly do not write about it afterwards, for obvious reasons, so an absence of reviews on a trauma cleaning company means very little either way.

Weight the things you can verify instead: the register, the registered name, and how the three practical questions get answered. The disposal one is set out in where the waste actually goes.