Website terms of use | Looking for Care

1. These terms, and who they cover

In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean the company named above, and “you” means the person using the site.

Provider organisations use Looking For Accounts under separate provider business terms. A person who works for a provider is also bound by these terms when they use the public site outside their business account.

We may update these terms to reflect a change to the service or to the law. The date at the head of this page is the date of the current version. Where a change materially affects people with accounts, we will take reasonable steps to tell them. Changes do not apply retrospectively.

2. What Looking for Care is, and is not

The site lets you find, compare, shortlist and contact care homes in England. It is free for families, and it always will be: the homes pay to be listed, you never do.

We are a directory and enquiry platform. We do not own, operate, manage, inspect or regulate the care homes listed on the site, and we are not a party to any care or accommodation contract between a family and a home.

In particular, we are not:

a care home, care provider, healthcare provider or social-care professional;
the owner, operator, manager or agent of any listed home;
the Care Quality Commission or any other regulator; or
an admissions, medical, clinical, legal or financial adviser.

We do not decide whether a person is suitable for a home, whether a home will accept them, what care they need, or what a council or the NHS will pay. Those decisions belong to the home, to the relevant professionals and to the funding body.

We cover England only. Homes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are regulated by different bodies and are not listed.

3. This is not an emergency service

Do not use this site to report an emergency or an urgent safeguarding concern.

If a crime is in progress or someone is in immediate danger, call 999. If you believe an adult is at risk of abuse or neglect, contact the local council’s adult safeguarding team or the police. Our complaints and safeguarding page sets out the routes.

4. Who may use the site

You must be at least 18 to create an account or send us personal information. If you are acting for someone else, you must have their permission or another lawful authority.

You are responsible for making sure that what you send us is accurate and does not infringe anyone else’s rights.

5. Listings and the information in them

A listing may contain:

official information from the Care Quality Commission;
information supplied by the home or its provider organisation;
an approximate location worked out from a postcode; and
labels and figures calculated by our platform.

We take reasonable steps to show where information came from and to correct errors reported to us, but information changes and may be incomplete. Check availability, fees, funding, facilities, staffing and contact details directly with the home before you rely on them.

A CQC rating belongs to the CQC and reflects the position at the last inspection. A “Verified” badge means we have checked that the person managing the listing is authorised to act for the home. It is not an accreditation, a guarantee or an endorsement of the quality or safety of care.

We do not publish reviews or star ratings from members of the public, and we do not accept payment to change a rating. How listings are ordered, and how membership affects that, is explained in full in our listings and ranking policy.

6. Search results

Search results are a tool for exploring the directory. They are not a recommendation, an assessment of need or professional advice. Discuss what is needed with the home and with the appropriate health or social-care professionals.

7. Enquiries

When you ask us to send an enquiry:

you are instructing us to pass the information you have given to the home you named;
that home becomes a separate controller of the information, and is responsible for its reply and for any later contact; and
we cannot guarantee that the home will read or answer it, or that a place is available.

Include only what the home needs in order to reply. Where your enquiry includes information about health, disability or care needs, you must give the separate explicit consent shown beside the form. If the information concerns someone else, you must have their permission or another lawful authority.

Sending an enquiry does not reserve a room, create a care contract, or commit you or the home to anything.

8. Your account, saved homes and notes

Give accurate details when you register, and keep your password and authentication codes to yourself. Tell us promptly if you think your account has been used without your permission.

Saved homes, shortlists and notes are organising tools, not medical records. Do not store medical documents, clinical records or payment-card details in them.

We may suspend an account where that is reasonably necessary to protect users, the service or someone else’s rights. You can close your account at any time in your settings; our privacy notice explains exactly what is deleted.

9. Acceptable use

You must not:

break the law, or encourage unlawful, abusive, discriminatory or harmful conduct;
impersonate anyone, or falsely claim authority over a care-home listing;
upload malicious code, probe our security, evade our controls or disrupt the service;
copy or extract the directory at scale without our written permission;
use enquiries, reports or contact forms for spam, marketing or harassment;
send us information you know to be false or misleading;
upload anything that infringes privacy, confidentiality, copyright or other rights;
include resident or staff records in a listing submission or a public profile;
try to obtain another person’s account, enquiry or private notes; or
use the site to build or train a competing database without our written permission.

We may investigate suspected misuse, remove content, restrict access and report conduct to the appropriate organisation or authority.

10. Intellectual property

We or our licensors own the design, software, branding and original content of this site. You may view and print a reasonable number of pages for your own non-commercial use. No other right is granted.

Care-home details and ratings from the Care Quality Commission are used under the Open Government Licence version 3.0 and remain subject to any third-party rights in them. Photographs, logos and text supplied by providers belong to their owners.

You may link to any public page in a fair and lawful way that does not suggest we endorse you. You must not frame the site or use our branding misleadingly.

11. Other websites

We link to care homes, the CQC, maps, charities and public services. We do not control those services and are not responsible for their content, availability, privacy practices or terms. A link is not an endorsement of everything on the site linked to.

12. Availability

We aim to keep the site available and accurate, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or free of error. We may change, suspend or withdraw a feature for maintenance, security, legal or business reasons. Doing so does not remove a right that has already arisen.

13. Events outside our control

We are not responsible for a failure or delay in providing the site caused by something outside our reasonable control, including a failure of public communications networks, of electricity supply or of a hosting or payment provider, and including fire, flood, epidemic, industrial action, act of terrorism or the act of a government or regulator. If such an event occurs we will tell you where we reasonably can, and our obligations are suspended for as long as it continues.

14. Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability where it would be unlawful to do so. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and for your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

If we fail to comply with these terms, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of that failure or of our failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable.

The public site is provided for personal and domestic use. We are not responsible for business losses, including loss of profit, revenue, business, opportunity or data, arising from business use of it.

We are not responsible for:

anything a care home does or fails to do, including its care, its admission decisions, its contracts and its failure to reply;
a decision made by the CQC, a council, the NHS or any other third party;
information supplied by a provider, where we did not know and could not reasonably have known that it was inaccurate; or
a website or service outside our control.

Nothing in this section reduces any responsibility we have under data protection law or under any other law that cannot be limited.

15. If a dispute arises

Please contact us first. Most problems are resolved quickly once we know about them, and our complaints and safeguarding page explains how we handle a complaint and how to escalate it if you are not satisfied with our answer.

We are not a member of an alternative dispute resolution scheme and are not required to be. If we cannot resolve a matter between us, you remain free to take it to court.

16. General

16.1: If a court finds any part of these terms unlawful or unenforceable, the rest continues in force.
16.2: If we delay in enforcing a term, or do not enforce it, that does not prevent us from enforcing it later.
16.3: You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours as part of a genuine reorganisation or sale of the business, provided that doing so does not affect your rights.
16.4: No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

17. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you keep the benefit of any mandatory protections of the law of that country and may bring proceedings in its courts.

18. Contact

Questions about these terms can be sent to:

Email: hello@lookingforcare.co.uk
Post: Legal, Looking Global Limited, Summer Shaw, Cudham Lane North, Cudham, Sevenoaks, TN14 7QR

Privacy questions are dealt with under our privacy notice. Complaints and safeguarding concerns have their own routes, set out on our complaints and safeguarding page.