Check a carrier's houseclearance.co verification status

What this page checks

A different question from "what is a waste carrier licence".

This page is the tool version of the topic covered on our waste carrier licence guide. That page explains what the licence is and why it matters. This page is for a narrower, specific question: for a given carrier, what does houseclearance.co's own record show about when and how that carrier's registration was last checked?

That is not the same as asking the Environment Agency directly whether a licence is currently valid. See the disclaimer below for why the distinction matters and where to go for the authoritative answer.

Required disclaimer

Read this before treating any future result here as final.

houseclearance.co is not the Environment Agency and does not issue or guarantee waste carrier licences. This page shows the result of houseclearance.co's own verification check, last performed on the date shown - it is not a live feed from the Environment Agency and not a guarantee of anything. For the authoritative, real-time licence record, always check the Environment Agency's public register of waste carriers, brokers and dealers directly, rather than relying on this page alone.

Two tiers, not one pass/fail badge

Why a future result here will never be a single generic "valid" tick.

Waste carrier registration in England comes in two tiers, and they don't work the same way:

• Upper-tier registration is time-bound and requires periodic renewal with the Environment Agency. Most house clearance carriers - anyone regularly transporting other people's waste for payment - fall into this tier. A result here needs to say whether the registration is currently within its renewal period, not just whether one exists.
• Lower-tier registration is, under current regulation, generally indefinite and does not require renewal. It covers a narrower set of circumstances, mostly a business's own waste rather than waste collected from customers.

Because "no expiry shown" means something different for each tier, a real result on this page will always state which tier applies to a carrier, rather than collapsing both into one generic valid/invalid badge. At this stage - with no onboarded carriers - there is no tier to display for any real carrier; this section describes how the checker is designed to behave once that data exists.

Where the data comes from

No live Environment Agency API - be clear about that.

There is no automated, live integration with the Environment Agency that this page draws on, and no such public API has been confirmed to exist. Building or describing this tool as if it queries a live government feed in real time would be misleading, so we don't.

For MVP, verification on houseclearance.co is fed by houseclearance.co's own manual and semi-automated records, not an automated regulator lookup. Once a carrier is onboarded, a result on this page reflects two underlying fields on that carrier's record:

• When it was checked - a timestamp for the last time houseclearance.co carried out a verification check on the carrier's self-reported registration.
• How it was checked - the source of that check, for example a manual lookup against the Environment Agency's public register versus a self-reported number still awaiting manual review. The page is designed to show this source alongside the status, not just a pass/fail icon, so a visitor can tell whether a result reflects an actual register check or an unverified self-report.

If a check becomes old enough to fall outside houseclearance.co's staleness threshold, the intended behaviour is to show a "last checked on [date] - re-verification due" state rather than presenting an old pass as if it were current. Automated Environment Agency API integration is a possible future enhancement, not a current or confirmed feature - it will only be built if a usable public API for this purpose is confirmed to exist.

Checking the authoritative source yourself

Don't wait on us - this is public information.

The Environment Agency keeps a public register of waste carriers, brokers and dealers, and anyone can search it directly by licence number or company name to see whether a registration is currently valid. That register - not this page, and not any carrier network - is the only authoritative source for whether a given licence is valid, current, and belongs to the entity claiming it. It only takes a couple of minutes to check and removes any doubt before waste actually leaves a property.

Search the official Environment Agency register ↗

houseclearance.co is not the Environment Agency, is not the regulator, and does not control who appears on that register. The houseclearance.co "verification status" above (once live) will only ever be an internal carrier network record of when houseclearance.co itself last checked a carrier - it is not currently live, and even once live it will never replace or override the Environment Agency's own register as the authoritative answer.

For more on why this matters and how duty-of-care rules affect you as a customer, see our waste carrier licence background guide.