Who this is for

You might run a cleaning business on your own, with two or three staff, or as a franchisee in your first year. You could be cleaning homes, offices, ovens, carpets or windows. Some of you are about to take on your first member of staff. Others are just starting out and working through registrations for the first time.

Few people running a small cleaning business have read an employment regulation or a piece of tax guidance before they needed one. The rules on pay, employment status, client rights, tax, data protection and health and safety are written for specialists.

Where each rule comes from

Every rule here is traced to the body that sets it: GOV.UK, HMRC, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), or legislation.gov.uk. Each page names that source next to the rule it supports, along with the date the source was read.

Rules on pay, tax and regulation change from one year to the next. The date tells you how current that reading was, so you can judge for yourself whether it's worth checking the source again before you rely on it.

The official material quoted here

Material published by GOV.UK, HMRC, the Health and Safety Executive and legislation.gov.uk is government information, released under the Open Government Licence. Where a rule is set out word for word rather than explained in everyday terms, it's marked as a quotation and linked back to the page it came from.

That link lets you read the rule in its original wording, in its original context.