The questions we get asked before the first call.

Fifteen to thirty minutes on the phone, no charge and no obligation. You tell us what you are dealing with — a site, a kitchen, a quote, a letter from an officer, or just a question you cannot get a straight answer to. We tell you what is actually required, what it would involve, roughly what it costs, and honestly whether you need us at all. There is no sales script and nobody will chase you afterwards.

You deal with Patrick or Joanne, start to finish. The person who takes your first call is the person who walks your site or your kitchen, writes your report, and picks up the phone six months later. There is no account manager, no team of juniors doing the work behind a familiar name, and your job is never subcontracted to a stranger.

No. After the free call you get a written scope and a fixed fee. Nothing starts until you say yes to that in writing. If you decide to do nothing, or to handle it yourself with what we told you on the call, that is a perfectly acceptable outcome and it costs you nothing.

For most enquiries in Thanet and East Kent we can be on site within two to five working days, and same-week attendance is usually possible. If you have an inspection date, a completion deadline or an officer visit already in the diary, say so on the first call and we will work backwards from it. Urgent, out-of-hours and weekend attendance is available and always priced before we commit, never afterwards.

A dated written report you can hand to a client, an officer, an insurer or a solicitor without translating it first. It contains what we found, photographs where they matter, and actions listed in priority order with a realistic timescale against each one. Where the job is a document build — RAMS, a Construction Phase Plan, a food safety management system — you receive the documents themselves, in a format you can edit and keep up. Every job includes a follow-up call so you are not left decoding a PDF on your own.

Most single-visit inspections and reviews start at £295, RAMS from £225, a Construction Phase Plan from £295, and a food safety management system build from £495. Our full published fee table is on the pricing page. Every figure is a starting point: the actual fee is fixed in writing after the free call, once we know the size of the job. We do not run an open-ended clock and we do not send surprise invoices.

Both, depending on which is fairer to you. Fixed fees suit anything with a defined deliverable — an inspection and report, a document build, a vetting pack — because you know the number before you commit. Hourly at £75 an hour, with a one-hour minimum, suits a desk-based question: reviewing a set of RAMS somebody has sent you, reading a quote, or getting a proper answer on a duty you are unsure about. Longer or less clearly defined work runs as a half day from £245 or a full day from £425.

No. VAT is not applicable, so every fee quoted on this site and in your written quotation is the total payable. Nothing is added on top afterwards. For your own records: PRAVISE is the trading name of Pravise Ltd, registered in England and Wales. The company number will be published on this site as soon as Companies House confirms it.

Travel is included within twenty miles of Margate, which covers the whole of Thanet and most of East Kent. Beyond that we charge 45 pence per mile from Margate, calculated on the outward journey only and agreed with you as part of the fee before work starts. It never appears as an unexpected line on an invoice.

No. We work with sole traders, single-site cafés and individual homeowners, and small jobs are welcome. That said, if what you need is one specific question answered properly, an hour of remote consultation at £75 is often better value than paying for a site visit — and we will tell you that on the call rather than sell you the visit.

Yes, and they are written around your actual job rather than pulled from a template library. That means your real sequence of work, your plant and access arrangements, your site constraints and the people who will actually be doing it. The single most common reason RAMS get rejected by a principal contractor is that they are generic documents with the site name changed — obvious to anyone reading them properly. First activity-specific document from £225, with additional related activities from £95 each.

CDM 2015 applies to all construction work in Great Britain, including domestic projects, with no minimum size or value. If you are having work done you are the client, and you must make suitable arrangements for managing the project, provide pre-construction information and satisfy yourself that whoever you appoint is competent. Where more than one contractor is involved you must appoint a principal designer and a principal contractor in writing, and a Construction Phase Plan must exist before work starts. On domestic projects your client duties pass automatically to the contractor, or to the principal contractor where there are several — that is the legal default, not something you have to arrange. If you do not appoint a principal designer or principal contractor yourself, the designer and contractor in control of those phases take on the roles by default. You can instead agree in writing for the principal designer to take on your client duties. HSE's guidance for domestic clients sets this out in full. We map exactly which duties sit with you on your project and produce the paperwork that proves they were met.

A Construction Phase Plan must exist for the project, and this is where domestic clients get caught out. The duty to produce it sits with the contractor, or with the principal contractor where more than one contractor is involved — but plenty of small domestic jobs run with nobody having written one at all, which means the project is non-compliant from day one and there is no documented plan if something goes wrong. You are not expected to write it yourself. You are expected to have satisfied yourself that it exists. Ask for it before work starts, and if nobody can produce one, that tells you something useful about how the rest of the job will be run. We produce proportionate plans for domestic and small commercial projects from £295 — short, specific and usable, not sixty pages nobody opens.

Yes. A contractor vetting pack covers company status and trading history at Companies House, the validity and cover level of their public liability and, where relevant, professional indemnity insurance, the trade registrations and accreditations they claim, whether their qualifications are current rather than expired, and their enforcement history where it is on the public record. We also read the quotation itself and tell you what is excluded from it, because that is where variations come from later. Up to three contractors from £275, additional contractors £75 each.

Yes, and it is worth doing before you make the final payment or put the property on the market. We verify Gas Safe certification against the register, Part P and electrical installation certificates including whether the certificate type actually matches the work carried out, FENSA or CERTASS registration for replacement glazing, and Building Regulations completion certificates. The point worth knowing: an invoice is not a certificate, and a compliment slip with a logo on it is not a certificate either. Missing paperwork surfaces at exactly the wrong moment — usually during a sale, or when you make an insurance claim. Paperwork audit from £195.

That is the single most useful time to call us. We run a readiness visit scored the way an environmental health officer will score it, across all three areas they assess, and give you a written action plan with the fastest-scoring items first. You then know what they will find before they find it, and you have documented evidence that you took steps to put it right — which speaks directly to the confidence-in-management score. From £325.

No, and anyone who does is misleading you. The rating is awarded by your local authority's officer on the day, on their professional judgement, and no consultant controls that. What we do influence is everything that feeds into it: hygiene and food handling practice, the cleanliness and condition of the structure, and confidence in management — which is where most points are lost and which is almost entirely about documentation being current and genuinely used. We fix what is fixable, evidence it properly, and support your re-score request when you are ready.

Whichever leaves you in better shape. Most small businesses want the system built properly once, around their real menu and their real processes, then handed over with a briefing so the team can run it — that is the £495 build. Others would rather learn to do it themselves, in which case we work alongside you and hand it over as we go. What we will not do is leave you with a folder you do not understand, because an unused system scores no better than no system at all.

Yes. Natasha's Law requires full ingredient and allergen labelling on food prepacked for direct sale — anything packaged on site before the customer orders it, such as sandwiches, salads or cakes in a chiller — and it applies to businesses of any size. If you make food to order at the counter it does not apply, but your full allergen information duties still do. We build an allergen matrix from your actual recipes, up to forty dishes from £245, and put a change-control step in place so a new dish cannot reach the menu without the matrix being updated first.

Yes — professional indemnity and public liability insurance, both in place. Certificates are available on request before you engage us, and we would rather you asked. Request them on the first call and they come over with the fee proposal.

No, and this matters. We are independent advisors. We do not issue statutory certificates, we do not carry out building control functions, and we are not a UKAS-accredited certification body. Where the law requires a registered installer, a structural engineer, an approved inspector or a certification body, we say so plainly and tell you what to ask for — we never blur that line to keep the work in-house. What we do is tell you what is required, check what you have been given, produce the documentation that is ours to produce, and give you an independent written record.

We are based at Westwood in Margate. Thanet is our home patch — Margate, Cliftonville, Westbrook, Garlinge, Westgate-on-Sea, Birchington, Broadstairs, St Peters, Ramsgate, Minster, Manston and the surrounding villages. We work regularly across East Kent including Canterbury, Whitstable, Herne Bay, Faversham, Sandwich, Deal and Dover, and take work in the wider county — Folkestone, Ashford and Sittingbourne — by arrangement. Travel is included within twenty miles of Margate. The full list is on the contact page.