Last Updated on September 17, 2026
The complaint that put Pimlico Plumbers in front of the Advertising Standards Authority did not come from an unhappy customer. It came from Wefix London Ltd, another plumbing firm.
One complaint. That was all it took to open a formal investigation into three lines of copy on a website.
The ASA published its ruling on 16 September 2026 and did not find the claims in breach. But the reason Pimlico were cleared is the part that should worry most business owners.
What was actually challenged
Pimlico’s website, seen in April 2026, carried a banner reading “24 HRS & EMERGENCIES”. Further down the page it said “24/7 availability Our call centre is always open to assist you with any property services and maintenance enquiries or emergency at any time day or night”.
Wefix London believed Pimlico’s engineers did not attend emergency call-outs in the late evening or early morning. They challenged whether the 24/7 claims were misleading and whether they could be substantiated.
The ASA assessed the website under CAP Code rules 3.1 (misleading advertising), 3.7 (substantiation) and 3.9 (qualification).
Rule 3.7 is the one that decides cases like this, and it is the one almost nobody plans for. It puts the burden on you. If you make a claim, you hold the evidence for it. Not your agency. Not whoever built your site three years ago. You.
What Pimlico produced
Pimlico did not argue their corner with adjectives. They produced records.
Twelve months of call data, from June 2025 to May 2026, covering weekdays, weekends and bank holidays, plus the schedule of overnight jobs booked across the same period.
The numbers were not the kind a marketing team would choose to lead with. The ASA noted that calls between 11pm and 7am amounted to no more than 3% of the total received in that period. Pimlico themselves said around 80% of overnight calls were for reasons other than emergencies, and estimated that overnight enquiries which resulted in booked emergency jobs came to approximately 0.5% of their total work booked annually.
None of that sank the claim. What mattered was that the job schedule showed jobs had been booked for attendance at each hour between midnight and 8am, including between 2am and 4am when the fewest were booked.
Small volumes, consistently evidenced, beat big promises with nothing behind them.
| What the ASA accepted as evidence | What most businesses could produce |
|---|---|
| Twelve months of call logs, broken down by hour | A rough sense that “we usually pick up” |
| A job schedule showing bookings at every hour from midnight to 8am | A few invoices, if someone can find them |
| Weekend and bank holiday coverage shown separately | Nothing that separates weekdays from weekends |
| A stated geographic limit on the service, inside the M25 | A claim written as though it applies everywhere |
Why this should change what you do this week
Most businesses reading this have a claim on their website they could not defend the same way.
“Same day response.” “We answer every call.” “Trusted by hundreds of local families.” “Next day delivery as standard.” Every one of those is a substantiable claim. Every one of them tends to live on a page nobody has looked at properly since it was written.
The trap is not that the claim is a lie. Usually it is broadly true. But broadly true is not the test. The test is whether you can produce documentary evidence covering a meaningful period, on the day somebody asks.
And the person asking may not be a customer. Here it was a direct competitor, with every commercial reason to read the homepage closely. It is the same direction of travel we wrote about when the CMA’s fake reviews work pulled ordinary testimonials pages into scope. The claims on your site are treated as statements of fact, because that is what they are.
One complaint is enough. The ASA opened a formal investigation into this website on a single complaint from a rival firm. There is no volume threshold protecting you.
One more detail deserves attention. Two issues were investigated in this case. Only one was not upheld. The other was informally resolved after Pimlico agreed to amend their advertising. So even the business that came out of this well still changed something.
The audit that takes an hour
Open your homepage and your main service page. Write down every claim you make about speed, availability, coverage, volume or credentials.
For each one, answer a single question: if a competitor reported this tomorrow, what file would I send?
If the answer is a file you already have, leave the claim alone. If the answer is “we would have to pull something together”, you have two options. Start recording the thing now, so that in twelve months you have what Pimlico had. Or soften the claim to something you can already evidence today.
Credential claims are the easiest to get right, because the proof already sits on somebody else’s register. It is also just as easy for a rival to check as it is for you, as our guide on how to check an electrician is NICEIC or NAPIT registered shows.
This is Start-stage work, not Scale-stage work. A claim you cannot back is a structural problem sitting underneath everything else, and no amount of ad spend on top makes the business safer. We found the same pattern when we checked 164 UK trade names against Companies House and 48 failed. That gap is usually neglect rather than dishonesty. It is still a gap.
The takeaway
Your marketing claims are worth exactly what your records can prove.
Pimlico were not cleared because their copy was clever. They were cleared because somebody had been keeping the call logs for a year before anyone asked to see them.
Start keeping yours today. If a complaint comes, it will arrive long after the window to collect the evidence has closed.
