Editorial policy

This policy covers the judgement calls behind what you see on iCare: what we publish, what we withhold until we're confident in it, and how we keep the parts of the site that make money separate from the parts that don't.

Independence from listings

No care home, provider or care group can pay to change its rating, its position in a search result, or the content of its own page. A home's placement in any list on iCare is determined only by the data attached to it — rating, distance, care type — never by a commercial relationship. Providers will eventually be able to claim and enrich their own listing (add photos, a longer description), but claiming a listing does not and will not affect how that home is ranked or sorted against others.

Separation from financial content

Where iCare discusses paying for care — equity release, local authority funding, lasting power of attorney — that content lives in its own clearly separate part of the site. We don't place financial offers, calculators or partner links on a care home's own page, on a town page, or on a county page. The only place you'll find a link between the two is a plain text sentence, written from the reader's point of view, that you have to choose to follow.

Publishing threshold for directory pages

We only create a dedicated page for a town, or for a care type within a town, once there's enough real data to say something genuinely specific about it — a minimum number of registered homes, not just a name we could plug into a template. Below that threshold, those homes are still shown, just on the parent county page rather than a thin page of their own. This is a deliberate choice to avoid publishing pages that exist only to target a search term rather than to inform anyone.

Inspection summaries

Plain-language summaries of CQC inspection reports are produced as described in how we source our data. They're generated from the official report text only, checked automatically against the rule that they may never state a rating word themselves, and left blank rather than guessed at where we haven't produced one yet.

Corrections

Every care home page has a way to report an error directly. When something is flagged, we check it against the CQC's current published record and correct the page if the data has changed or was wrong. We don't remove a home from the directory because a correction request was unwelcome — only because the underlying CQC record shows it should be removed (for example, the home has closed or deregistered).

Reviews, when they launch

iCare does not yet carry family reviews. When it does, moderation will follow a published reviews policy, and we will only display an aggregate rating once there's a genuine body of reviews behind it — never before.