Review Policy

Draft for review. This document is a starting template. It has not been reviewed by a legal professional and must be checked and completed before launch. It is not a guarantee of legal compliance.

Our approach

Reviews on Teesside Business Hub are written by customers about their own experience with a business. We publish genuine reviews whether they are positive or negative.

Who can leave a review

Anyone who has genuinely used the business. You must not review a business you own, work for, are related to, or compete with. One review per person per business.

How reviews are checked

Every review is checked by our team before it is published. Where possible we ask reviewers to confirm their email address. We check that a review appears to be genuine and follows this policy. We do not check whether a review is positive, and we never edit what a reviewer wrote.

Reviews we will not publish, or will remove

• Reviews that are not about a genuine customer experience, or are written by or for the business or a competitor
• Duplicate reviews
• Offensive, abusive, discriminatory or threatening content
• Personal information (for example phone numbers or addresses of individuals)
• Content that may be unlawful or defamatory
• Spam or advertising

What businesses can and cannot do

Businesses cannot pay to remove, hide or change reviews, and advertising with us has no effect on reviews. Reviews belong to the business's listing, not to an advertising package: if a package ends, or a listing is paused, archived or removed and the business later returns, its existing reviews come back with it unchanged. A returning business cannot start a new listing to reset its reviews. Businesses may post one public reply to a review, which we check before publishing. If a business believes a review breaks this policy, they can tell us and we will look at it against this policy only.

Incentives and review cards

Businesses must not offer anything in return for a review. If a reviewer tells us they received something, the review is labelled "Incentivised". Businesses that use our review cards or review links must offer them to all customers, not only those they expect to leave positive reviews.

Ratings

The rating shown for a business is the average of all its published reviews on this site. We do not import ratings from other websites.

Your data

We use your email address only to confirm and administer your review; it is never shown publicly. Your name is shown as first name and last initial. See our privacy policy. To ask us to remove your review, use our contact form.

Concerns

To report a review, use our contact form and choose "Complaint".