Does your company's product labelling and/or service information provide relevant, accurate, unambiguous and easily-accessible information?

Rationale for question

Consumers require certain information about products and services to make considered judgments before purchase and to fully benefit from their choices. Insufficient, inaccurate or misleading information can damage consumer confidence, risk legal challenge, introduce health and safety risks and threaten a company's reputation. Therefore, it is important that any product and service information is easy to find, stated in plain and understandable language and is not confusing, ambiguous or deliberately misleading. For companies that are offering services, it is particularly important to ensure that the consumer is fully aware of what the service includes - and sometimes what it excludes.

Some service information and product labelling is required by law. Other details are not regulated. For example, health claims do not have to be verified before a product goes on sale in the UK. However, there are broad legal obligations about quality, purpose and description of goods or services, so any claims that are made must be based on factual evidence and should not be based solely on the opinion of the manufacturer or service provider.

It is largely up to the individual company to choose what it says about its own products or services and where to say it, for example, on websites, marketing material, in pamphlets, or on labels and tags. Relevant information can include: product or component origin, manufacturing process elements, health and safety information, contract stipulations, product performance, indicative pricing and all costs (as opposed to hiding some in the small print).

Defining Terms

[No specific or technical terms require definition.]

Primary and Secondary answer requirements

ANSWERING YES

Companies must:

confirm all of their product labelling or service information is relevant, accurate, unambiguous and easy to find;
mention any applicable legislation concerning product labelling and service information; and
explain how they provide their product or service information, e.g. through product tags, leaflets, menu information, or the internet.

Companies may:

describe what they include in the product labelling or service information;
state whether their product labelling or service information is audited by another organisation, e.g. the Plain English Campaign;
provide factual evidence in support of the product labelling or service information;
explain any procedures for handling challenges to labelling or service information; and
mention awards or accolades they have received for their product labelling or service information.

ANSWERING NO

Companies must:

explain why they do not or cannot answer YES to this question, listing the business reasons, any mitigating circumstances or other reasons that apply.

Companies may:

mention any future intentions regarding this issue.

DON'T KNOW is not a permissible answer to this question.

NOT APPLICABLE is not a permissible answer to this question.

NO ANSWER YET is only permissible under extraordinary circumstances and then for only a limited period.

CLEVEL

YES

All of our product service information is relevant, accurate, unambiguous and easy to find.

We provide certification to all clients confirming the projects they are linked to and the extent of the linkage.

Project descriptions are issued to clients on a regular basis and are also provided on the company website.

SEE Questionnaire Summary

Business Introduction

Business Information

Goods and Services

Business Responses

Marketplace Ethics

CLEVEL

YES

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