Choosing a removals company

It is also the only day of your life when everything you own is loaded into one vehicle and driven from one place to another. So why do we invite risk?

This is a short guide to protect that day. To let us embrace the emotion of moving, good or bad.

The perception problem

Most of us move home only a handful of times in a whole life, and long stretches pass in between. And somehow, in a moment that rare and that important, anyone can call themselves a removals company. So when that once-in-a-decade day finally comes around, we walk into it exposed.

There is no licence to be a mover. No register you have to be on, no public standard that consumers could point to.

The professional firm with trained crews, its own warehouse and full insurance, and the operator who registered a name last week and hires whoever is available that morning, are, as far as the law and most comparison websites are concerned, the same thing.

They appear side by side. They compete on one number. Why?

Thinking that it's the same market is a trap. The person standing with that decision is you: usually nervous, usually rushed.

So before we talk about price, understand that the question, on a day this important with a worst case scenario of losing everything you own, is not "who is cheapest." Ask, "who is real", and that can be difficult to answer from outside the industry itself.

Moving is rarely an ordinary day. You are either moving toward something, a new home, a fresh start, or away from something, a house you loved, a life that is changing.

A move that goes wrong does not just cost money. It takes the day from you. Whatever that day was meant to mean to you, you never get it back.

It is no surprise that when a move collapses, the impact people report most is not financial. It is emotional, and it is hardest of all on older movers.

So to my previous question, here is the short answer, and the rest is the explanation:

You already know how to choose safely

You would not find a boiler engineer on Facebook and pick the cheapest one. You would want them Gas Safe registered, because gas is dangerous and the register exists precisely so you do not have to work out for yourself whether a stranger is competent.

Removals has no mark of competence, no equivalent of Gas Safe, nothing separating the trained professional from the man who printed cards last week. So the caution you would never drop when choosing who fixes your boiler is exactly the caution you are forced to supply yourself when choosing who moves your entire home.

That is why this trade runs on word of mouth. People ask a sister, a neighbour, a colleague, because we inherently know this is the fabric between the different periods of our lives and something going wrong here leaves for catastrophe. Trust is the one thing you cannot read off a website.

Which is what makes aggressive discounting dangerous rather than attractive.

When an operator competes hard on price, they are asking you to move the most precious and stressful thing you own on the basis of who was cheapest, rather than who was safe. In most purchases a low price is a win, and the process either side of the moving is expensive, so saving money on the move feels like a win.

That is an error to an order of magnitude. It is the thing that should make you look twice.

Think about the conveyancer, decorator or solicitor. If any of that goes wrong, you lose money. If a house move goes wrong, you can quite literally lose everything.

Who is actually carrying your furniture

Start with the one that hides in plain sight. You can dodge the obvious man-with-a-van and still get caught. Plenty of operations look like a firm, a name, a logo, a couple of trucks in the photos, and are really a phone and a rolling list of casual day-labour.

The crew that turns up has never worked together, was hired that morning, has no employment to protect and disappears that evening.

No training, no accountability, no one who answers for the damage because no one who did it will be there next week.

This is not the majority. But there is a significant and growing minority in the unregulated space. This is a gamble where the downside is your life's belongings and your upside is potentially saving a few hundred. How is it even a choice?

A professional firm employs its own people. Trained crews, on the payroll, who the company is legally and financially responsible for. That is expensive for exactly the reason that makes it worth it: real employees carry obligations and cannot be conjured up for a Tuesday and forgotten by Wednesday. It is the single hardest thing for an unregulated man and van to fake, because faking it costs as much as doing it.

So the first question underneath every quote is not about price. It is about people. Whose hands are on your possessions, and who stands behind them.

The insurance gap most people never check

A professional removals firm carries goods in transit insurance, often up to £50,000 of cover, along with public liability running into millions. A man with a van often carries very little, and sometimes none at all.

Even if they do, your own home contents insurance usually will not fill that gap.

Comparison sites including GoCompare, Uswitch and Compare the Market all give the same warning: most contents policies only cover your possessions in transit if a professional removals company carries out the move.

Use a man with a van, or move yourself, and a good number of policies simply will not pay out.

Aviva put the value of an average UK household's possessions at around £58,000 in early 2025. So the real risk of the cheapest quote is not the couple of hundred pounds you save. It is that everything you own can travel uninsured, by the operator and by your own policy at once, and if it is lost or destroyed, no one pays. A professional firm also gives you a claims process, and a business that will still exist next week to honour it. Many are members of trade bodies or run software that enables them to offer tracked dispute resolution, and protect the money you pay in advance through escrow services or payment guarantee schemes. With an uninsured operator there is a mobile number that stops being answered.

Someone will actually turn up

A man with a van is one man and one van. If he is ill, double booked, or takes a better job that morning, your move does not happen, on the single day the law requires your old home to be empty and your new one is waiting.

A professional firm has more than one crew and more than one vehicle. If something goes wrong, someone else comes. Booking at the last minute to replace a no-show typically costs a premium of twenty to forty per cent, if you can find anyone at all.

You are paying for the near certainty that your move happens on the day planned, because you're guided in the planning.

Somewhere for your things to go if the day slips

Chains break. Completions are delayed by hours, sometimes days. When that happens, your possessions need somewhere safe to go immediately, at no notice.

This is a broken system and it's something the professional firms mitigate.

A firm with its own storage can arrange storage over a two-day period so you never move on the day you complete, removing the stress entirely. Or if you pack it into a day and it falls through, a professional firm absorbs that without drama. Your life goes into a secure warehouse for a night or a week and comes out when the keys are ready.

A man with a van cannot do this.

This is why local storage matters: a firm with its own facility near where you are moving can hold your things safely and get them to you quickly, without your entire move depending on the chain completing to the minute.

Now do the honest sum

Choosing a professional firm might cost you a few hundred pounds more than the cheapest van. That is the whole premium, and it buys everything above.

Now look at what one thing going wrong costs. A collapsed or delayed completion costs the average household around £2,830 in direct, unrecoverable costs, on figures from the Open Property Data Association, drawn from a survey of five thousand movers.

A load lost or damaged by an uninsured operator can cost you the value of everything in the van, potentially tens of thousands, with no payout from anyone. A no-show can cost you the completion itself.

So the sum is simple. A few hundred pounds of premium, against thousands, sometimes everything, if it goes wrong. The professional firm is not the expensive option.

It means you never find out what the cheap one really costs.

The five questions that tell you who you are dealing with

You cannot easily see insurance, or training, or storage.

But you can ask. Five questions separate a real firm from a risk, and how they answer tells you more than any price:

• Do your own employees carry out your moves, or do you subcontract?
• What goods-in-transit and public liability insurance do you carry, and will my own contents insurance cover this move?
• What happens if my completion is delayed - do you have your own storage local to me?
• What standards do you comply with? Anything that starts with BS or ISO is a good sign you are working with a serious, reputable organisation.
• Are you a member of an industry recognised group? In the UK, the gold standard is FIDI, highly recommended if you are an international mover and also well respected within the UK industry, along with the British Association of Removers, AIM, NGRS and Move Assured.

A firm that answers these easily and specifically is showing you what you are paying for.

A firm that gets vague is telling you something too.

The honest summary

A professional move is not expensive. It is priced. The cheapest quote is not cheaper. It is unpriced risk, and you pay the real price later, on the day something goes wrong.

None of this is your fault. You are being asked to tell a professional from a chancer with almost nothing to go on, on the most stressful week of your year, in a trade that has made the difference deliberately hard to see. But until it changes, you are the one holding the risk, so the best thing you can do is refuse to be conned into buying on price alone.

When you compare quotes, do not just compare the numbers. Ask what each one includes. Ask the five questions above and listen to how they answer. That tells you, far better than the price, who you are really dealing with.

Choose the company that can look after the hardest day, not just the cheapest one.

These are my words, but this is not one person's point of view. If it helps someone choose well on a hard week, share it, print it, pass it on. It is written to be used. The more people who move house knowing what to ask, the harder it gets for the unregulated and the easier it gets for the firms doing it properly.