Complaints About Removal Companies in the UK

Complaints recorded by each council

Each row is one Trading Standards service's own count of consumer complaints about removal companies, as supplied in its FOI response. 2026 runs to the end of September unless the council stated otherwise. Councils count differently, so compare a council with itself over time rather than one council with another.

Surrey and Buckinghamshire share one Trading Standards service and returned identical figures, so they appear once. Birmingham's figures include storage firms and run to 15 October 2026.

What people complain about

Where councils categorised their cases, the complaints fall into three groups. The same three show up in every service that gave a breakdown, in different proportions.

• • Damaged, lost or withheld belongings. The largest single category in Kent (37 of 100), Cornwall (26 of 54, plus 8 cases of goods withheld until extra payment) and Birmingham (13 damage and 4 missing-item cases of 56).
• • Substandard or incomplete service and breach of contract. The largest category in Sheffield (30 of 44 between the two headings), Surrey and Buckinghamshire (41 of 81) and Hampshire (32 of the cases that were detailed).
• • Money: the price going up on the day, deposits not returned, extra charges. Kent recorded 23 complaints of the price increasing on moving day and 12 of a deposit or refund not returned; Cornwall 7 price increases and 6 deposit or cancellation disputes; Kent also logged 20 cases of misleading actions or outright scams and 8 firms that never turned up.

Enforcement: 478 complaints, no prosecutions

Every responding council was asked what enforcement followed. Across 478 complaints, the responses record one investigation (Cornwall, 2024) closed with verbal and written warnings, three Barnet cases still open in 2026, and nothing else: no prosecutions, no cautions and, outside Cornwall, no formal warnings. Hampshire holds no enforcement records at all for the category.

That is not a criticism of individual officers. Removals is an unlicensed trade, Trading Standards budgets have shrunk for a decade, and most of these disputes are civil matters between a customer and a firm. It does mean the practical protection is in the booking, not the law: a written quote after a survey, a company with a trading address and goods-in-transit insurance you have seen, and no large cash deposit. Our questions to ask a removal company cover each of the complaint types above.

How the data was collected

• • Freedom of Information requests were sent to 29 UK councils and Trading Standards services in October 2026, asking for the number of consumer complaints recorded against removal companies in each calendar year from 2023, the main complaint categories, and any enforcement action taken.
• • 11 councils have replied with figures as of 3 November 2026. Leeds holds no data and referred the request to West Yorkshire Trading Standards; the rest are within or past their statutory 20 working days and have been chased. New responses are added to the table and the CSV as they arrive.
• • Figures are reproduced as supplied. Where a council's own reply contained an inconsistency it is noted in the CSV rather than corrected.
• • Councils record complaints differently: some log every enquiry to the Citizens Advice consumer service, others only cases they investigated, and categories are each council's own. Totals across councils are indicative, not a national rate.

Using these figures

• • Free to republish with attribution and a link to this page.
• • Cite as: “MovingCost.co.uk, Freedom of Information responses from UK Trading Standards services, 2026”.
• • The CSV carries every council's reference number, so any figure can be checked against the original response.
• • Journalists: the original council responses and a contact are in our press kit.

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