Frequently Asked Questions

TrustonTap is a care agency that helps support you with experienced carers tailored to your individual needs. We give families choice and control over who cares for their loved ones, allowing vulnerable people to stay in their own homes for longer whilst ensuring their carers are better rewarded for the care they provide. We select trusted and affordable care and support by matching you or your loved ones with a handpicked carer near you, removing the complexity and reducing the cost of arranging home care.

Initially, customers either register with us or pick up the phone so we can talk through your care requirements. Once we are happy we have all the information we need about your loved one,  we can start your search. We will then match you with a choice of vetted and experienced carers in your local area, based on your needs, location, and preferences. We will then send you a selection of the most suitable carers. You can review those carers and choose an individual that suits your needs and your budget.

We won’t leave you on your own, we here every step of the way to help you make the best decision. We can help identify the most suitable carer(s) to meet your needs and put you in touch with one another to arrange an introductory meeting.

We recognise that your care needs may change and that you need the flexibility of being able to change your arrangements. This needs to be balanced with the need of your carer(s) to be able to manage their workloads and to ensure that they are able to support you when required.

For small changes in hours and days, our carers will try to accommodate your needs. However, for cancellations with less than 48 hours notice you will be charged the appropriate care costs. For a number of engagements with individual carers, longer notice periods apply and will be specified on your booking.

TrustonTap uses the latest technology to remove many of the traditional agency costs, saving you money and ensuring that all our carers are better rewarded. Our carers tend to be more experienced and often more motivated than other traditional agencies.

A  carer from TrustonTap will cost £15 to £19 per hour compared with  £20 -£25 per hour for carers from traditional domiciliary care agencies.

All of our TrustonTap carers are self-employed and set their own charge-out rates. They decide their own schedules and we leave it to them to control the delivery of their care to you in the way that they believe is best. We believe that this gives you a more dedicated, personal service with the consistency of one trusted carer who is able to meet your needs on a reliable and regular basis. All our carers receive regular feedback from customers and we ensure all feedback is published on our website. This ensures that we maintain the highest quality of care.

At the same time, we have designed TrustonTap to be simple and convenient for you or your family to use. We’ve made it easy for you to choose the right carer with the right skills at the right price to come and give you some help. Plus, all payments are transparent through our secure cashless payment system.

At TrustonTap, we believe in enlisting highly capable carers to support you and ensuring that they are fairly rewarded. All carers are self-employed and set their own rates of pay according to their experience and skills, taking into account that they need to cover their own travel costs and expenses.

Throughout the course of any contracts with you, you pay the carer the rate on their profile. For the services we provide to the carers, we charge and subsequently deduct a commission of 18% plus VAT. This covers our team who will work with you on your introduction, insurance, payment services and any other support.

We have removed many of the traditional agency costs saving you money and paying our carers more than traditional agencies so their actual take home pay is much better for the care they give you.

We have tried to make it as easy as possible for you to pay for the support you receive, and have developed a secure online payment process that ensures we are protecting both you and the carers that are supporting you.

In most instances, we agree how many hours per week you require care for and we set up a booking between you and your carer(s) that reflects this.

Each week, your carer completes a timesheet in relation to the booking, and we send you an invoice, depending on how many hours care had been provided to you in the previous weekly period. We then deduct payment by Direct Debit before transferring to the account of the carer. This ensures that you are only charged for the number of hours you have actually received each week, and you are not charged more than the maximum hours you have specified.

Yes. We recognise that it is helpful to meet a carer in advance of agreeing to an engagement. Where this cannot be easily arranged in person, we encourage you to arrange a video call (e.g. via Skype) with your recommended carer

Almost all of our carers will conduct an introductory visit free of charge and this can be arranged by telephone or email. If you are happy with them when they visit you, you can then confirm to us and we can proceed with your booking.

Feel free to ring us and we can assist you should you have any difficulty.

You can book as little as four hours per week or as much as you like. For convenience, we encourage you to make the booking for the maximum number of hours you are likely to need and then separately arrange the precise times with your carer. We will ensure you are only charged for the number of hours you have actually received each week, and you are not charged more than the maximum hours you have specified.

Should you agree to proceed with a booking for a particular carer, you agree to the Carer/ Client Agreement which comes into effect between you and the carer.

This Agreement governs the nature of your contractual arrangement with the carer and is a standard agreement that applies for all your engagements via TrustonTap. (As carers are self-employed contractors, it is not compulsory for them to use this agreement. They will let you know if they wish to use a different agreement in advance of any booking).

In addition to the Carer/ Client agreement, your assignments are governed by the Client Terms and your carer are governed by the TapTeam Assistant Terms they agreed when they were selected as a carer.

Once payment details have been taken, we send both you and the carer a summary of what you have booked.

We have arranged public liability insurance with £5m coverage underwritten by a leading insurance underwriter. In addition, many of our carers have their own personal liability insurance. For carers who offer Transportation in their own cars, we insist that they are fully insured to protect you if anything happens. Safety and security of you and of our carers is of paramount importance to us.

It is not possible for you to pay our carers directly, but payment via the TrustonTap site has been designed to be very simple and straightforward. All payments are made via our secure online payment system in a process designed to protect both you and the carers.

Any direct cash payments that are made or requested would breach the terms and conditions we have with each of the carers would endanger their ability to secure further work and would invalidate the insurance cover.

As detailed in the Client Terms that govern TrustonTap’s relationship with you, a Placement fee would be charged to you if you were to agree on any direct engagement with a carer that we have introduced you to. Please ring us if you wish to discuss this further.

We know the importance of continuity of care and our carer will try to provide you with as much continuity as possible. However, there are times when they may be ill or away, and you may need someone to cover during their absence.

This can usually be arranged via the TrustonTap customer services team who will recommend the most suitable carers in your area.

Recruiting the very best carers is a key priority for us and we put considerable effort into our selection process. We select our brilliant team of trusted local people with the confidence that they can come to your home and deliver an exceptional service to you. In fact, one of our key criteria is that we would be happy to recommend them to our own relatives.

We carefully screen and interview all our trusted carers via a multi-stage recruitment process to ensure that all our carers on the TrustonTap site are competent, compassionate, kind, honest and reliable. Everyone is fully vetted and DBS background checked. Plus, we obtain two references on all carers that we take on, to ensure the good character of the people who will be supporting you. Over the last 3 years, we have taken on less than 5% of carers that have applied to us.

To support the quality of care that is provided to you, we encourage our carers to maintain their professional development and provide a number of written and video training materials via their bespoke carer portals. We insist that all our carers complete face to face annual refresher training in Safeguarding, Manual Handling and First Aid.

Yes, you can have several contracts running at the same time. It may be that you would like to have one carer to assist you with general home help on certain mornings, but would like a different carer to come round on different days to take you out to the shops.

Our carers have different backgrounds, different skills and different availabilities, and we have designed the TrustonTap system to accommodate your preferences and to allow you to have parallel contracts with a number of them.

Each of our carers sets their own rate of pay according to their skills and experience. A few of them have higher rates for weekends and bank holidays. Should you agree with them that they would work on major holidays (Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day or Easter Sunday), the carer will typically charge 50% higher than their hourly rate on these days. All rates of pay are shown clearly on your booking confirmation.

We are always happy to help and keen to assist you in choosing the most suitable carer, whether it is for a short term assignment or a longer contract. In the end, it is up to you to make the final decision. Whatever your choice, TrustonTap customer services will always be there to support you.

If you are not happy with your arrangement, we would encourage you to tell your carer what you are unhappy about. In most instances, your feedback will ensure that their service to you can be modified so that you are satisfied with future service.

However, in certain circumstances, it may be better to talk to us. Please let us know immediately if we can help and if you have concerns over any of the carers. If you believe your career has breached their contract with you, we will review the evidence and reimburse you if appropriate. At the same time, we will review any evidence presented to us by a carer who has reason to believe that you have breached your contract with them.

All our carers have agreed to comply with the TrustonTap Code of Conduct. This code is modelled on the Code of Conduct for Healthcare and Adult Social Care workers in England. The code is designed to give you the confidence that you will be treated with dignity, respect and compassion at all times. We treat allegations of breaches of that code very seriously.

We recognise that your plans may change and that you may wish to adjust your level of support from TrustonTap or to select a new carer. Feel free to visit the site to see who else is available or ring us on 0808 2781112.

We know how important it is to have people you can really trust. That’s why we strive to always go the extra mile in ensuring you can be confident in the carers that you take on.

We put considerable efforts into hand-picking the very best carers to be available to you. We only list those individuals who we would be happy to recommend to our own relatives, and have established a very thorough vetting procedure to ensure that all of them can be trusted.

In addition to the usual application forms and telephone interviews, we also conduct thorough individual interviews and ensure that everyone is fully vetted and DBS checked. We only engage with carers who we believe to be competent, compassionate, kind, honest and reliable, and insist that all carers agree to comply with the TrustonTap Code of Conduct.

Although some carers conduct personal care, TrustonTap is defined as an introductory agency by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and is not required to register.

As a result of this, we are unable to make changes to a care plan, to recommend the increased frequency of visits or to take responsibility for replacing a care worker for personal care assignments. We are also unable to direct changes to the activity of the carer in relation to Personal Care & Hygiene work. All TrustonTap carers are self-employed and are therefore not required to be registered with CQC.

Although regulatory agencies are currently unregulated by CQC, TrustonTap uphold carer quality standards by agreement with regional authorities and will only list carers on our platform who meet the TrustonTap Qualified Professional Carer (QPC) standard.

Establishing this benchmark ensures that carers offered to clients in the region conform to the following standards:

• Acceptance and understanding of the TrustonTap Code of Conduct
• Agreement to TrustonTap Carer Assistant Terms and Conditions 
• Identity checks and confirmation of their right to work in the UK
• Enhanced DBS
• Training certificates checked and recorded
• Annual refresher training in Moving & Handling, First Aid and Safeguarding
• Confirmation of HRMC tax reference number
• Support by 2 references

Furthermore, TrustonTap carers are supported by a bespoke personal training portal through which they have access to over 30 training manuals and videos to support their professional development.

No. We require in our terms and conditions that all carers are self-employed. As self-employed individuals, each carer determines his or her hourly rates, terms of engagement, bookings, schedules, responsibility for the delivery of tasks, transportation, training, holidays and tax affairs