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Checking a coach or course in the UK: your rights and the public records

By CourseKiln Editorial·Published ·3 min read

In the United Kingdom the law is strong on how a course is sold and silent on whether it works. Since April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has banned fake reviews outright and treats mandatory fees as automatically unfair, and the Competition and Markets Authority can fine a business up to ten percent of its global turnover, or £300,000 if that is greater, without going to court first, and it can hold a director personally liable. What no rule does is make a coach prove, before you pay, that their method delivers or that the track record on the page is real. That gap is yours to close, and the public records here are among the best in the world for doing it.

What the law covers, and the gap it leaves. The DMCCA carries a list of practices that are unfair in every case, including fake or incentivised reviews and invented time limits. Drip pricing, where a headline price hides mandatory add-ons, is caught by the total-price rule. None of that reaches the product itself. There is no licence to be a business coach and no requirement to publish what typical students actually earn.

The advertising and earnings rules a seller already has to meet. Under the advertising code, anyone making an earnings claim must hold evidence for it before publishing, and that evidence has to reflect a typical buyer, not the best performer. A "results not typical" line does not rescue a misleading headline. The Advertising Standards Authority cannot fine, but an upheld ruling against a seller is an aggravating factor if the CMA gets involved.

Check the public record. Search the seller and their company at Companies House (find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk). You can see the company, its directors, its filed accounts, and a freely searchable register of disqualified directors. The limit: sole traders leave no footprint here at all, and small companies can file abbreviated accounts that hide profit and loss. So a missing or thin record is a question to ask, never a verdict on its own.

If it teaches investing. The moment a course is really about trading, crypto or investing for returns, you are in the territory of the Financial Conduct Authority and financial-promotion rules. Check the FCA register and stop. That is the edge of what this guide covers.

If it goes wrong. Pay on a credit card, not a debit card. For a purchase costing more than £100 and up to £30,000, Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act makes your credit card issuer jointly liable if the service is not delivered as described, a protection a debit card does not give you. One catch worth knowing: if you paid through a third party such as PayPal rather than directly to the seller, that can break the Section 75 chain. A chargeback is the second route, it works on both credit and debit cards, and it is often the more reliable option when an intermediary was involved. You usually have a 14-day cooling-off right on something bought online, and that window stretches to twelve months if the seller never told you about it. To complain, start with Citizens Advice, which routes to Trading Standards, report patterns to the CMA, and report suspected fraud to Action Fraud. The full UK recovery path is on getting your money back in the UK.

Then run the method that works on any seller: proof you did not make yourself.

Common questions

Does UK law make a coach prove their method works before selling it?

No. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act is strong on how a course is sold, it bans fake reviews and treats mandatory fees as unfair, but no rule makes a coach prove the method delivers or that the track record on the page is real before you pay. There is no licence to be a business coach and no requirement to publish what typical students earn.

Does a clean Companies House record mean a UK coach is trustworthy?

No. It shows the company, its directors, filed accounts and the disqualified-directors register, which is useful, but sole traders leave no footprint there at all and small companies can file abbreviated accounts that hide profit and loss. A thin record is a question to ask, and a tidy one is not proof the method works.

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