Terms of service

Bars.co.uk is operated by Alcohol Ltd, trading as Bars.co.uk. Alcohol Ltd is registered in England and Wales under company number 04854930. Its registered office is The Limes, Bayshill Road, Cheltenham, England, GL50 3AW. In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean Alcohol Ltd.

These terms apply with our Privacy Policy, the rules shown at the point where you submit information, and any service-specific terms. The widget rules, published venue-standard version and API guide form part of these terms when you use those features.

If service-specific rules conflict with these general terms, the more specific rule applies to that feature. Nothing in these terms removes rights that UK law gives consumers.

Bars.co.uk provides a public-interest venue information service, a voluntary Responsible Community Venue Standard, community profiles, maps, public issue-handling summaries, a small venue page API, website badges and free mediation for eligible community issues.

Bars.co.uk is not a government service, regulator, council, licensing authority, emergency service, court, legal adviser, insurer or trade body. A public venue page does not prove that a venue has a current premises licence, sells alcohol, is open, is safe, is accessible or is owned or operated by a named person.

Food hygiene information comes from the Food Standards Agency and relevant local authorities. It concerns food hygiene and is not a complete assessment of a venue. Maps, nearby places, photos and local background may come from other named sources. Each relevant page explains its sources and dates.

Device-location suggestions can be inaccurate or unavailable. They are only for finding venue pages, not for navigation, emergencies or personal-safety decisions. Check routes and distances independently.

Information can become out of date. Check time-sensitive facts, opening details, accessibility needs, prices, transport, safety matters and legal status with the venue or the correct public body before relying on them. Nothing on Bars.co.uk is legal, medical, licensing, financial or professional advice.

• You must be at least 18 to create or control a venue account.
• You must provide accurate, current information and only act for a venue or organisation when authorised.
• You must protect passwords, sign-in links and access codes. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has used them.
• You must not share another person's private mediation link or try to enter an account, case or staff area without permission.

Claiming a venue page does not give you ownership of that public page or the underlying official record. We may request evidence of authority, place a claim on hold after an operator change, limit permissions, or revoke access if authority cannot be confirmed.

You are responsible for activity performed through access credentials under your control unless you told us promptly that they were compromised. We may keep a limited audit record after an account closes where this is reasonably needed for security, disputes, legal duties or the integrity of published decisions.

The standard is voluntary and privately operated by Bars.co.uk. A self-certified result means an authorised venue representative completed the published questions and declarations. It does not mean that Bars.co.uk checked every answer. An audited result means a reviewer checked the stated sample and evidence on the date shown; it is not a guarantee about every practice or future event.

The result is not government approval, a food hygiene rating, a premises licence, an insurance assessment or a promise that no incident will occur. A score is calculated under the displayed version of our method. It can expire, be corrected, be suspended after a material concern, or be reviewed when a venue changes operator or circumstances.

Venues must answer honestly, keep required proof, tell us about material changes and avoid presenting a result after expiry, suspension or withdrawal. Private application answers and proof are not automatically public. The public page shows only the fields described before submission.

Payment cannot buy a score, certification result, public venue page or higher search position. If a paid independent audit is offered, its price, cancellation rights, scope and deliverables will be given separately before purchase. Venues can use the published appeal process for a standard or audit decision.

A “Public Contribution” is text, a photo, video, poster, caption, transcript or other material that you deliberately send through a form which clearly says it is for public use. “Private Material” includes unpublished drafts; claim, certification and audit proof; private report and mediation information; feedback; staff notes; and anything else a form says will be private. “Personal Data” means information that identifies or could identify a person.

A licence in these terms applies only to intellectual-property rights that you are entitled to license. It does not remove anyone's privacy, confidentiality or data-protection rights. Personal information is used only for the purposes and lawful reasons in our Privacy Policy and the notice shown when it is collected.

The required licence for public content

You keep ownership of your Public Contribution. When you select public display and submit it, you give Alcohol Ltd a non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free licence to host, store, back up, reproduce, cache, review, moderate, publish, display, communicate and make it available through Bars.co.uk pages, search results, widgets and social previews.

This licence lets us make the technical and accessibility changes reasonably needed for those uses. These include cropping, resizing, compressing, transcoding, captioning, translating, creating transcripts, thumbnails and previews, and correcting obvious formatting. We will not knowingly make a substantive change that alters your meaning without your approval or a clear editorial label.

Our contracted hosting, storage, content-delivery, accessibility, moderation, search and social-preview providers may use these rights only as needed to provide those services to Alcohol Ltd. The required licence does not let us sell the contribution as standalone content, put it in a public or paid dataset or API, or use it to train, fine-tune, test or evaluate an artificial-intelligence model.

The licence lasts while we publish the contribution. You may ask us to stop future public use. We may keep restricted copies only for the backup, rights-record, complaint, security and legal-claim periods in our Privacy Policy. Copies already lawfully cached or downloaded by independent organisations may remain outside our control.

Optional wider reuse

We receive wider rights only if the submission form shows a separate, unticked choice and you actively select it for the identified contribution. Refusing does not affect access, ordinary publication, certification, search visibility or ranking.

• Alcohol Ltd research and model development. If selected, Alcohol Ltd may use the chosen Public Contribution, after excluding Personal Data and Private Material, for any lawful Alcohol Ltd purpose involving the development, training, fine-tuning, testing and evaluation of its search, classification, moderation and accessibility tools. A contracted model provider may process it only for Alcohol Ltd and may not use it to train its own general model.
• Paid APIs and data products. If selected, Alcohol Ltd may include the chosen Public Contribution, after excluding Personal Data and Private Material, in clearly described paid APIs or datasets and license customers to reproduce and analyse it under the applicable product terms. Alcohol Ltd may charge for those products. You do not receive a fee unless we separately agree one with you.

Each optional permission is non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free. You may withdraw it for future releases and model-development runs. Withdrawal may not remove copies already lawfully supplied to customers, completed anonymous research results or information already incorporated into an existing trained model; the notice shown before selection explains these limits.

Facts, statistics and private material

We may combine non-personal factual information you provide with other public venue records and use facts and statistics that neither identify a person nor reproduce a substantial part of your protected expression for any lawful Alcohol Ltd purpose. This does not give us ownership of your copyright and does not override a source licence, confidentiality duty or data-protection rule.

Private Material is not covered by either public licence. You give us only the limited permission needed to receive, securely store, copy, malware-scan, redact, review and share it with the authorised participant, reviewer or contracted provider described in the private service. We may preserve or disclose the minimum required by law or a lawful safety need. We do not publish it, place it in an API or commercial dataset, use it for advertising, or use it to train, fine-tune, test, benchmark or improve an internal or third-party artificial-intelligence model.

What you promise when you submit content

For a Public Contribution, you promise that, after reasonable checks, you created it or have authority from every relevant rights holder; have told us about required credits, sources and licence conditions; believe its factual statements are accurate and its opinions are genuinely held; and have not knowingly included unlawful, infringing, defamatory, confidential, misleading or privacy-invasive material. You must have the permissions or other lawful basis needed for identifiable people. Do not include children or sensitive personal information unless the form expressly allows it and the required safeguards are in place.

For a report, you do not promise that a disputed allegation has already been proved. You promise that your account is honest, not knowingly false or malicious, and makes clear what you observed yourself and what somebody else told you.

Where you are the author or director, you consent to the technical and accessibility changes listed above and agree not to assert moral rights only so far as reasonably needed for those permitted uses. To the extent that your electronic acceptance is effective as a signed written waiver, you waive those rights only to that limited extent. This never permits false attribution or knowingly derogatory treatment. If somebody else holds moral rights, you promise that they have given the necessary consent.

We do not promise to publish content. We may scan, review, refuse, label, restrict, unpublish or remove it where reasonably needed for law, safety, privacy, confidentiality, intellectual-property rights, accuracy, licence compliance, security, technical operation or the integrity of the service. Reviewed proof media may improve visibility only for the exact community feature it demonstrates; it does not change a certification score or buy general ranking.

The report and mediation service is a free way for a person and venue to discuss a problem and try to agree practical steps. A report is not a finding of fault, wrongdoing or legal liability. Reports do not change a venue's score, certification or general search position.

Our unaccredited service is limited to eligible non-contract community matters, such as noise or impact on neighbours, where independent mediation is suitable. We may change this scope if Alcohol Ltd becomes accredited, receives an exemption, or works through an authorised arrangement.

You must be at least 18 to submit a report or take part in mediation. If you are under 18, ask a trusted adult to contact us for you. Use 999 or the appropriate safeguarding service if someone may be in danger.

Mediation is voluntary. It is not an emergency response, police report, regulator complaint, legal representation, investigation, formal arbitration or court process. We do not promise that a venue will reply, that either side will agree, or that a particular outcome will be reached.

Starting mediation does not pause any legal, regulatory, licensing, insurance or complaint deadline. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 999. Use the police, local authority, licensing authority, Food Standards Agency route or independent legal advice where appropriate.

You must be honest, use the service respectfully, keep access links private and submit only material relevant to the issue. You must not harass, threaten, impersonate, pressure another person to hide a valid safety concern, or use mediation to make a knowingly false or malicious allegation.

We may check identity and venue matching, moderate messages, restrict unsafe material, pause a case, or direct either party to a more suitable service. Either party may leave mediation. We may close a case after inactivity, misuse, a safety concern, lack of jurisdiction or when continuing would be inappropriate.

A month-level issue type and handling status appears publicly only under the permission and review process described in the Privacy Policy. A mediated outcome is published only when both parties approve the same neutral wording and our privacy review approves it. Public wording must keep the no-fault notice. Private identities, messages, evidence, offers and agreements are not public.

The free API only returns a link to a published Bars.co.uk venue page. It does not provide photos, government data, coordinates, scores, profiles, reports or mediation records. It has a fair-use limit of 30 requests in a rolling 60-second period for each client.

You must not evade a rate limit, overload the service, conceal abusive automation, use the API to test private identifiers, or treat cross-origin access as permission to copy material outside the stated API response. Cache results responsibly and follow the current API guide. We may change, limit or withdraw an endpoint to protect people, licences, security or service capacity.

Widgets and badges must keep the current status, self-certified or audited label, accessibility information, Bars.co.uk link and free reporting/mediation link. Do not edit them to claim a different score, remove expiry information, hide required attribution or imply government or Food Standards Agency endorsement.

Search engines may crawl public pages in line with our robots instructions. Other automated access must use a documented interface or our written permission. API or widget availability is not a service-level guarantee.

You must not use Bars.co.uk to break the law, facilitate an offence, exploit or endanger a child, share intimate material without consent, harass or threaten, promote hatred, defraud, infringe rights, reveal restricted personal information, interfere with the service, introduce malware or bypass a security control.

We may use automated checks for file type, size, rate limits and malware. These technical checks do not decide whether a person's account of an incident is true. Authorised people may review content where needed for moderation, safety, certification, mediation or an appeal.

We may block an upload, restrict access, preserve evidence, remove or reduce visibility of content, notify an affected person, or contact a public authority when reasonably needed and lawful. Urgent action may happen without advance notice. Where appropriate, we explain a moderation decision and provide a way to challenge it. Use the appeal route for a certification decision, the correction route for a venue fact, or email legal@bars.co.uk about a content decision.

To report illegal content or a serious misuse of the service, email legal@bars.co.uk with the page or case context. Do not send sensitive evidence by ordinary email; ask for a secure upload route.

Alcohol Ltd owns or licenses the Bars.co.uk name, original design, explanatory copy, certification framework, calculations, code, audit summaries and original editorial material. Except where a stated licence permits it, you may not reproduce, sell, scrape, frame, alter or create a confusingly similar service from that material.

You may view public pages, share links and make reasonable personal or internal-business copies. Any wider reuse depends on the source attached to the exact material. Open Government Licence terms apply only to the public-sector fields identified as such, not to a whole mixed-source venue page or database.

Food Standards Agency data, OpenStreetMap data, Wikipedia context, Geograph images and venue-supplied content keep their own licences, credits and restrictions. Official marks, rating images and third-party logos may have separate rules. Read where the information comes from before reusing it.

Links and embedded services operated by other organisations are provided for convenience or attribution. Their terms and privacy practices apply when you use them. Naming a source does not mean that source endorses Bars.co.uk.

We use reasonable care to operate the service and distinguish official data, venue statements, licensed media and our own calculations. We do not promise uninterrupted access, permanent storage of a public page, or that third-party information will always be complete and current.

The service may be unavailable or changed for maintenance, security, legal requirements, source outages, licence changes or product improvements. We may remove a feature or data source if continuing to use it would create an unacceptable legal, safety, privacy or reliability risk.

Use the correction route for a wrong venue fact and the photo-report link beside an image for a wrong or outdated photo. We may keep a dated correction or decision record instead of silently rewriting historical information.

We may update these terms. We will change the date and, for a material change affecting an account or active service, use a reasonable method to tell affected users before it takes effect. A material expansion of rights over content already submitted requires fresh express agreement; a general update does not add retrospective AI, data-product or other commercial rights. The applicable terms, notices and permission versions for a saved submission remain recorded where needed.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, breach of your statutory consumer rights, or any other liability that the law does not allow us to exclude or limit.

If you are a consumer: we are responsible for loss or damage that is a foreseeable result of our breach of these terms or our failure to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, for business loss, or for a problem caused solely by information you or an independent source supplied where we used reasonable care.

If you use the service for a business: subject to the responsibilities that cannot lawfully be limited, we are not responsible for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue, opportunity, goodwill, anticipated saving, business interruption or loss of data. Our total liability arising from the service in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of £100 and the fees that business paid Alcohol Ltd for the affected service during that period.

Public venue information, scores, reports, maps and mediation do not replace your own checks or professional advice. We are not responsible for a venue's acts or omissions, for an agreement made between mediation participants, or for the independent acts of data providers, map providers, venues, users or linked websites. This does not excuse us from responsibility where our own breach or lack of reasonable care caused foreseeable loss.

Business contributions only: if a Public Contribution is submitted for a business, that business will reimburse Alcohol Ltd for losses and reasonable external legal costs finally awarded by a court or agreed in a reasonable settlement, but only so far as they arise directly from a third-party claim that the contribution infringes intellectual-property or confidentiality rights because the business broke the rights or authority promises above. We must promptly tell the business, allow reasonable control of the defence, take reasonable steps to reduce the loss, and not agree a settlement that admits wrongdoing by the business without its consent. This does not cover loss caused by Alcohol Ltd's breach, negligence or deliberate misconduct. It does not apply to a consumer acting outside a trade, business, craft or profession.

You may stop using the public service at any time and may ask to close an account. We may suspend or end access after a material breach, security risk, loss of venue authority, unlawful activity or repeated misuse. We will give notice and a chance to respond where that is reasonable and safe. Terms about rights, confidentiality, retained records, liability and disputes continue where their nature requires it.

Send a service complaint or legal notice to legal@bars.co.uk or to the registered office above. Privacy complaints follow the separate process in our Privacy Policy.

These terms and any non-contractual dispute are governed by the law of England and Wales. A consumer keeps any mandatory protection of the part of the UK where they live and may bring proceedings in the courts available to them under consumer law. If you use the service for business, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

If a court finds one term unenforceable, the rest continue. A delay in enforcing a right does not waive it. You may not transfer your account or rights without our permission; Alcohol Ltd may transfer this agreement as part of a genuine business reorganisation or sale if that does not reduce consumer rights. No person other than you and Alcohol Ltd has a right to enforce these terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.