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PUBLISHED 25 July 2026 · Matt Novell
Today we're publishing UKLSP v0.1-draft — an open specification that makes UK local service providers discoverable, quotable and bookable by AI agents — together with its JSON Schemas, an MIT-licensed reference implementation, and a certification harness that awards three levels: Discoverable, Quotable, Bookable.
Retail got its agent protocols in the last twelve months. Local services got nothing. This is the missing layer.
Ask an AI assistant to buy headphones and, increasingly, it can complete the purchase through structured agent-commerce rails. Ask it to book the gas safety certificate your rental legally needs by the 14th and it hits a wall of websites built for human eyeballs: no machine-readable price, no live availability, no way to transact. The demand side of local services is racing ahead — the supply side has no protocol.
UKLSP v0.1 is deliberately small: six objects, four REST endpoints, three MCP tools. It encodes the realities of UK trade work rather than abstracting them away — postcode-district coverage, AM/PM windows, VAT treatment on every price, and statutory credentials (Gas Safe, NICEIC and the rest) as machine-checkable register references that are honestly labelled as verified or not.
Three rules are absolute in this draft. Slots are server-authoritative, so agents can never double-book an engineer. Every booking names a human principal — autonomous agent-to-agent booking is out of scope until liability questions mature. And fictional demo listings are fenced at the protocol level: quotable for testing, unbookable by design.
The first vertical is landlord compliance, because it is the perfect proving ground: recurring, deadline-driven, legally mandated, and exactly the errand people most want to hand to an assistant. The extension model adds further trades as data, not forks.
What we're looking for now: implementers to break the draft, providers who want to be first on the line, and platforms — lettings software especially — who see what auto-booked compliance does for their landlords. The spec is CC BY 4.0, the code is MIT, and the governance page explains exactly how changes happen and who decides. Start with the quickstart; the demo inventory is live.