What counts as off-premises
The distinction is about where the contract was agreed, not where the work happens. A contract concluded in the consumer’s home or workplace — in their presence, away from your business premises — is off-premises.
For most trades that is the normal way of working. You visit, you look at the job, you give a price, they say go ahead. That conversation is the contract, and it happened at their kitchen table.
It is worth being clear about the thing this is not. These are not faults rights, and they are not about whether the work was any good. They exist because the consumer agreed to something away from a shop, without the chance to compare or reflect, and the law gives them a window to change their mind.
The criminal offence almost nobody knows about
This is the part that makes the page worth reading. Regulation 19 provides that "a trader is guilty of an offence if the trader enters into an off-premises contract to which regulation 10 applies but fails to give the consumer the information listed in paragraph (l), (m) or (n) of Schedule 2 in accordance with that regulation".
Those paragraphs are the cancellation ones: the conditions, time limit and procedures for exercising the right to cancel, the model cancellation form, and — where applicable — that the consumer must bear the cost of returning goods. On summary conviction the penalty is a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale.
A criminal offence is a different category of risk from a contractual one, and it attaches to the ordinary practice of agreeing a job in somebody’s house without handing over a cancellation notice. It is not aimed at rogue traders; it catches the careful ones who simply never knew.
And if you never give the notice, a year
Separately from the offence, regulation 31 extends the cancellation period where the trader does not provide the information about the right to cancel.
Give it late but within 12 months and the period ends 14 days after the consumer receives it. Never give it and the period ends 12 months after the day it would otherwise have ended.
For a trade that means a job agreed in March, paid for and completed, can still be cancelled the following spring. The regulations are not a theoretical risk to a business whose paperwork is a quote on a phone and a handshake — they are the default position.
Starting work inside the 14 days
The obvious objection is that a boiler cannot wait a fortnight, and the regulations do contemplate that. A consumer can expressly request that work begins during the cancellation period, and where they have, the trader is entitled to be paid for what has been supplied up to the point of cancellation.
The protection there runs on the request being express and on the information having been given. Beginning work without it, on the assumption that the customer obviously wanted it done, is where a trader ends up having done the work and not being able to charge for it.
The practical version: get the go-ahead in writing, alongside the cancellation notice, before anybody picks up a tool. That is a paperwork habit rather than a legal project.
What a trade website should actually do about it
A website cannot hand somebody a cancellation notice at their kitchen table. What it can do is make the paperwork happen reliably, which is where most of the value is.
- Publish your cancellation terms as a page, in plain English, and link to it from your quote template. It costs nothing and it is evidence that the information exists and is given.
- Put the model cancellation form on the site as a downloadable and a web form, so a customer who wants to cancel has an obvious route that creates a record.
- Make the quote process produce the notice. If quotes go out by email from the site or a connected tool, the cancellation information rides with every one automatically rather than depending on somebody remembering.
- Say plainly on the site how urgent jobs are handled — that you will ask for an express request to start early, and why. Customers read that as professionalism rather than as legalism.
- Keep the written go-ahead. A form submission with a timestamp is worth considerably more than a recollection of a conversation.
A trade that publishes this properly has something almost no competitor has, on terms almost nobody is defending.
