Welcome to Hibant Care. These Terms of Service explain the rules for using our website, our mobile app and the other online services we provide. Please read them carefully. By using our website or app, you agree to these terms.
We have written these terms in plain English. Where something needs to be precise, we have kept it precise, but our aim is for you to actually be able to understand what you are agreeing to.
1. Who we are
Hibant Care is operated by Hibant Care Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales with company number 17180137. In these terms, "Hibant", "we", "us" and "our" mean Hibant Care Ltd. "You" and "your" mean the person using our website or app.
You can contact us at or on 020 7870 1352.
2. What these terms cover
These Terms of Service govern your general use of:
- our website at hibantcare.com and its pages;
- our mobile app;
- our online portal; and
- our community board.
Together we call these the "Platform".
These terms apply to everyone who uses the Platform, whether you are simply browsing, reading our blog, posting on the community board, or are a registered user.
If you register and use the Platform in a particular role, a further agreement also applies to you:
- If you register as a family member or someone arranging care (an "Account Holder"), the Account Holder Service Agreement applies to you in addition to these terms.
- If you register as a carer, the Carer Platform Agreement applies to you in addition to these terms.
If anything in these Terms of Service conflicts with the Account Holder Service Agreement or the Carer Platform Agreement, that role-specific agreement takes priority for the matter it covers. Our Privacy Notice, at hibantcare.com/privacy.html, also forms part of your agreement with us and explains how we handle personal information.
3. What Hibant is, and what it is not
This is the most important section of these terms, so please read it carefully.
Hibant is an introductory care agency. We run an online platform that helps families and individuals who need home-based care or support to find, contact and engage independent, self-employed carers. That is the whole of what we do.
To be completely clear about what this means:
- We do not provide care. We are not a care provider, a care agency or a domiciliary care service.
- We are not regulated by the Care Quality Commission (or the Care Inspectorate Wales, the Care Inspectorate Scotland, or any equivalent regulator), because we do not carry on any regulated activity. The CQC's own guidance recognises introductory agencies of this kind as sitting outside its registration requirements.
- We do not employ carers. Carers who use the Platform are independent and self-employed. They are not our employees, workers or agents, and we do not supply them under our direction or control.
- We are not an employment business.
- We do not direct, manage, supervise or quality-assure the care that carers provide. We do not set rotas, we do not create or approve care plans, risk assessments or clinical documents, and we do not control how care is delivered.
- We are not a party to the care relationship. When a family and a carer agree to work together, they enter into a direct contract with each other. We are not part of that contract.
What we do is make introductions, provide the technology that lets families and carers find each other and communicate, verify carer onboarding information, and provide the payment tools described in section 7. Beyond that, the choice of carer, the direction of care and the day-to-day arrangement are matters for the family and the carer.
We cannot and do not guarantee the suitability, quality, character, performance or availability of any carer. We give you tools and verified information to help you choose well, but the choice, and the responsibility for directing the care, is yours.
4. Using the Platform
Eligibility. You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract to register for an account or to post on the community board. The Platform is intended for use in the United Kingdom.
Your account. If you create an account, you agree to give accurate, complete and current information and to keep it up to date. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, and for keeping your login details secure. Please tell us promptly if you think someone else has accessed your account. One account per person; accounts may not be shared, sold or transferred.
Keeping the Platform safe and lawful. When you use the Platform, you agree not to:
- use it for any unlawful, fraudulent or harmful purpose;
- post or share content that is false, misleading, defamatory, harassing, abusive, obscene, discriminatory or threatening, or that infringes anyone else's rights;
- discriminate against any other user on the basis of any characteristic protected by the Equality Act 2010;
- impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your identity, qualifications or connection to any person;
- attempt to circumvent, copy, scrape, reverse-engineer, overload or interfere with the Platform or its security;
- introduce viruses or malicious code, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the Platform or its systems; or
- use the Platform, or information or content obtained through it, for any purpose other than the genuine arrangement of care, or to send unsolicited marketing.
We may remove content, and suspend or close accounts, where these rules are broken. Where the breach is serious, or where we have a safeguarding concern or suspect fraud, we may do this immediately and without notice.
Availability. We work hard to keep the Platform running well, but we cannot promise it will always be available, uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, suspend or withdraw parts of the Platform, and carry out maintenance, from time to time.
5. The community board
The Platform includes a community board where users can post and respond to care-related posts. The community board is a space for genuine, respectful, care-related conversation. The rules in section 4 apply to everything you post there, and in addition:
- Post honestly and respectfully. Be truthful, be kind, and keep posts relevant to care.
- Do not give medical, clinical or legal advice. The community board is not a place for diagnosis, treatment advice or anything that should come from a qualified professional. Please do not post it, and please do not rely on it.
- Protect privacy. Do not post other people's personal information, including details that could identify a care recipient, a carer, a household or an address, without their clear permission. Take particular care with anything about a person's health.
- No advertising or solicitation beyond genuine care-related posts, and no attempts to move other users off the Platform.
- You are responsible for what you post. You keep ownership of the content you post, but you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, display and share it as part of operating and promoting the Platform. You confirm you have the right to post it.
Community board content is created by users, not by Hibant. We do not check every post before it appears, and we do not endorse what users say. We may moderate, edit or remove posts, and we encourage you to report anything that concerns you to .
6. How introductions work
The Platform lets families search carer profiles, make contact, and arrange and confirm bookings. Any matching, suggestion or ranking feature is a technical aid only. It does not select a carer for you, and it is not a recommendation. The final choice of carer is always yours, and we encourage you to interview carers, check references and make any further checks you think appropriate before engaging anyone.
Carer verification. Before a carer is permitted on the Platform, we take reasonable steps to verify their identity, their right to work in the UK, an Enhanced DBS check (with a barred-list check where the role is eligible), two professional references, their Care Certificate or equivalent training, and their professional indemnity and public liability insurance. We carry this out with reasonable care and skill. We cannot, however, guarantee the accuracy or completeness of information a carer gives us, and verification is not a guarantee of a carer's suitability or future conduct.
The Care Information Organiser. The Platform may offer a tool called the Care Information Organiser. This is a structured way for a family to organise and set out the information they choose to provide about the care they are arranging. It is created and owned by the family. It is not a clinical assessment, a care plan, a risk assessment, a prescription or any form of professional or medical advice, and Hibant does not author, approve, monitor or update it. Responsibility for the care recipient's care plan rests with the family and the carer, never with Hibant.
7. Bookings and payments
When a family confirms a booking with a carer, payment is handled through the Platform's Payment System, the payment infrastructure provided to us by our payment service providers, currently Stripe. Carer payouts are processed through Stripe Connect.
In normal use, the family is charged the full agreed rate for a booking through the Payment System, the funds are held until the booking is completed, and the carer is then paid their share. A carer's right to receive payment for a booking depends on cleared funds having first been received from the family. We are not the carer's paymaster and we do not guarantee payment by a family.
For some first bookings we may operate Trust Mode, a discretionary first-booking programme. Where Trust Mode applies, the family is charged after the booking is completed rather than before, and the carer is paid within seven working days of cleared funds being received. We may change, suspend or withdraw Trust Mode at any time.
Refunds, chargebacks and disputes about the care itself are matters between the family and the carer. We may, acting reasonably, pause, hold or reverse a payment while we look into a genuine dispute or a safeguarding concern.
Stripe as a separate provider. Stripe processes payments and verifies certain information as our payment service provider, and acts as a separate data controller for the information it collects and verifies for that purpose. Stripe's own terms and privacy policy apply to its services. We never ask you to give us your card or bank details directly, and you should never send them to us. They are entered with Stripe.
8. Fees
Families pay no fee to Hibant. Registering, searching, messaging and booking through the Platform is free for families. Families pay carers the agreed rate for the care, through the Payment System.
Carers pay a platform fee. Hibant earns its income from a percentage Platform Fee paid by carers, not by families. The current fee is 10% of a booking on our Standard tier, or 8% on our Reward tier, which also includes an optional £5 per month subscription for additional benefits. The Platform Fee and the Reward tier are set out in full in the Carer Platform Agreement. The Platform Fee is paid for the ongoing services we provide to carers: identity verification, profile hosting, the messaging tools, the payments infrastructure, support, safeguarding escalation and access to introductions. It is not a fee for the care itself, which carers contract for directly with families.
If we ever need to invoice you separately for a charge that genuinely arises under your agreement with us (for example, an off-platform fee under section 9), that invoice is payable within 14 days.
9. Going off-platform
We invest significantly in finding, vetting, onboarding and introducing carers, and our business depends on Platform Fee income from bookings made through the Platform. Because of this, the Account Holder Service Agreement and the Carer Platform Agreement each contain a non-circumvention provision: for 12 months after an introduction, families and carers agree to keep transacting introduced care through the Platform rather than arranging it privately to avoid the Platform Fee.
If a family engages an introduced carer outside the Platform in breach of that provision, an Off-Platform Fee becomes payable. As set out in the Account Holder Service Agreement, this is the greater of £1,500 plus VAT per carer, or 30% of the value of the off-platform engagement over the first 12 months. The precise terms, including the limited situations where the provision does not apply (such as a genuine prior relationship that predates the Platform), are set out in that agreement. This is a deliberate, transparent term, and not a hidden charge. It is explained here and in your role-specific agreement so you can see it clearly before you commit.
10. Intellectual property
The Platform, and everything we have created for it (its software, design, layout, text, graphics, logos, trade marks and the way information is organised) belongs to Hibant or to those who have licensed it to us. You may use the Platform for its intended purpose, but you may not copy, reproduce, adapt, republish or commercially exploit any part of it without our permission.
You keep ownership of the content you create and upload (such as a profile or a community board post). By uploading it, you give us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sub-licensable licence to host, display, reproduce, adapt and share that content for the purpose of operating, improving and promoting the Platform. You confirm that the content is yours to share and does not infringe anyone else's rights.
11. Our responsibilities, and the limits of them
We take our responsibilities seriously, and there are some things the law does not allow us to limit, and which we would not want to. Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for:
- death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
- fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or
- anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.
Your statutory rights as a consumer are not affected by these terms.
Subject to that, and because of the introductory nature of our service, we are not responsible for:
- the acts, omissions, defaults or negligence of any carer (carers are self-employed and are not our employees or agents);
- the quality, safety, timeliness or suitability of the care itself;
- any claim about the employment status of a carer engaged by a family, including any tax, National Insurance, holiday pay, minimum wage or other employment claim;
- loss arising from an off-platform engagement;
- content posted by users, including on the community board; or
- interruptions, errors or unavailability of the Platform.
Subject to the first paragraph of this section, our total liability to you in connection with the Platform and these terms is limited to the greater of £1,000, or the total Platform Fees we received in connection with bookings relating to you in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, opportunity, goodwill or data.
As a goodwill measure, Hibant maintains public liability insurance covering accidental damage by a carer to a family's or care recipient's property, subject to the terms of that policy. This is a goodwill layer only. It does not replace a carer's own insurance, and it is not a guarantee that any claim will be paid.
12. Safeguarding
The safety of care recipients matters deeply to us. If you are ever concerned that someone is at risk of harm, abuse or neglect, please contact the emergency services if it is urgent, contact the relevant local authority's adult safeguarding team, and let us know at .
We will cooperate with the relevant authorities, and we may suspend, restrict or end a user's access to the Platform where a credible safeguarding concern has been raised. Where we reasonably consider it necessary to protect people, we may inform other affected users of a concern, complaint or investigation.
13. Privacy
How we collect and use personal information is explained in our Privacy Notice at hibantcare.com/privacy.html, which forms part of these terms. Please read it. It also explains how long we keep information and the rights you have, including the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.
14. Suspending or ending access
You can stop using the Platform, and close your account, at any time.
We may suspend or end your access to the Platform: on reasonable notice for convenience; or immediately, where you have seriously broken these terms, where there is a safeguarding concern, where we suspect fraud or unlawful use, or where we are required to do so by law.
Ending access does not affect any rights or obligations that have already arisen, and the sections of these terms that are intended to continue (including sections 3, 9, 10, 11, 13 and 16) will continue to apply.
15. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms from time to time, for example, to reflect changes to the Platform, to our services or to the law. If we make a significant change, we will give you reasonable notice by posting the updated terms here with a new "last updated" date and, where appropriate, letting you know directly. If you continue to use the Platform after a change takes effect, you accept the updated terms. If you do not agree to a change, you should stop using the Platform.
16. General
Whole agreement. These terms, together with the Privacy Notice and (where they apply to you) the Account Holder Service Agreement or the Carer Platform Agreement, are the whole agreement between us about your use of the Platform.
If part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest of them continue to apply.
No waiver. If we do not enforce a term straight away, that does not mean we have given up the right to do so later.
Transfer. You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these terms. We may transfer ours to a group company or to a successor of our business.
Third parties. Except where these terms say otherwise, no one other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.
Governing law. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. Disputes will be dealt with by the courts of England and Wales, though if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings in your local courts in line with your statutory rights.
17. How to contact us
For any question about these terms, or about the Platform:
Hibant Care Ltd Email: Phone: 020 7870 1352
Thank you for using Hibant Care.