The Race to Stop Builders Who Vanish With Deposit
Two Camps Race Toward the Same Promise
Two teams are running the same course, and they do not agree on where the finish line sits. One is the government, which has promised a crackdown on rogue builders and a register of trusted traders due to start this month. The other is the industry body that believes the register — and the payments app being built alongside it — is the wrong instrument. Both say they want the same outcome: a homeowner who can hire a tradesperson without fear. The race is about which standard a household meets first.
The app the government is backing is called Trusted Payment, and it carries the endorsement of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. Its director, James Walker, says the aim is to build a “trusted network for consumers” while helping reputable tradespeople win more business. [1] The register of trusted traders is meant to give that network a front door — a list a household can check before the first knock on the door. The crackdown was set out as a priority by the government, with the register’s go-live scheduled for the coming weeks.
Walker is careful about what the system can and cannot do. “We are not going to stop a rogue trader going out,” he says, “but we are providing a trusted mechanism so you know if you use this process you are protected.” [1] That sentence carries the logic of the whole policy. A mechanism protects the customer who chooses it. It does not stand in the doorway.
The second camp is not persuaded that a badge fixes a market. Rico Wojtulewicz, head of policy and market insight at the National Federation of Builders, says many reputable builders may simply choose not to join Trusted Payments because they are busy and already do good work. “We don’t think this is the best approach,” he says. [2] The federation’s counter-proposal is a digital building passport for every building — effectively a logbook recording all significant work and who did it. If that work later fails, or is found to be substandard, the failure should be recorded against the builder responsible. In Wojtulewicz’s account, that would shine a light on companies that consistently do poor-quality work.
The Controversy Arrives Before the Evidence
Start with the controversy, because it is the honest place to start. A register is only a list of names, and a list cannot compel anybody to sign it. If the busiest reputable builders stay away, the list fills with whoever is left. The protection on offer covers a transaction, not a doorstep. The fraud described below did not begin with a badly built wall; it began with a conversation.
Sheri Ingram, now 35, can date the red flags precisely because she lived through them. In her early 20s and just out of university, she and her then boyfriend hired a builder to renovate a house in the south Wales valleys. Lee Slocombe, a builder from Swansea, offered to do the work cheaply because he had materials left over from another job, then asked for money upfront to buy additional supplies. “At the time, we believed him,” she says. The couple budgeted about £8,000 for work that included removing a supporting wall and building an extension with a balcony. A supporting wall carries weight from above; taking one out is never cosmetic.
Within weeks, the house had been ripped apart. Slocombe pulled up the floorboards and removed the floor joists, saying they had wood rot and needed to come out. He took out the staircase, took down the walls and removed the ceiling. The first floor was pinned up using metal poles, and he threw the rubble out the back. Then came the pattern that defines this kind of fraud: every new problem demanded new money. Ingram’s boyfriend borrowed another £6,000 from family, and by the end the couple had handed over about £14,000.
The builder gave various excuses about where the money had gone. He said he was expecting a medical payout for an injury suffered on another job, and that he would use it to repay them. He turned up one day in a sling and said he needed a few weeks off. After about six weeks, he disappeared. Slocombe was jailed for six years in February after defrauding nine victims of £400,000, his latest conviction in a decade of offending. Ingram’s case had been part of a previous trial.
The scale around her is measurable. In July, the consumer charity Citizens Advice said 4.8 million homeowners had a problem with a home repair job in the previous 18 months, from unfinished or unsafe work to disputes with traders. [3] About 1.7 million had to pay more to fix earlier work, or had been overcharged, losing an average of £750 each. [3] For one in 10 of those, the extra cost topped £5,000. [3] Ahead of the planned clampdown, complaints about cowboy builders have risen sharply. Protection is being promised at the moment the problem is widening.
A Doorstep, a Quote, and a Closing Window
The protective machinery has precise edges, and those edges decide who wins. Milestone payments are delayed by 24 hours, giving the customer time to cancel if they feel under pressure. [4] Money for completed work is held in escrow by the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman until the job is finished to both parties’ satisfaction. [4] Escrow simply means a third party holds the cash until the agreed conditions are met. Projects costing more than £2,500 carry a two-year warranty. [4] A trader who fails to follow an ombudsman decision can be banned from the app.
Paul Boielle, 82, is the customer that machinery was designed for. Three men knocked on his door and asked whether he needed any roofing work. It was soon after his wife’s funeral, and he was caught off-guard and, by his own word, “vulnerable”. He showed them a problem with a corner of his roof. “Before I knew it, they’d taken the tiles off,” he says. Among the three was the roofer David Vincent, from Orpington, London.
The men told Boielle the problem was more serious than he realised and advised replacing the entire roof, quoting £30,000 — about twice what he says it should have cost. [5] He paid a £5,000 deposit. Roofers arrived soon afterwards, removed the solar panels and tiles, re-felted the roof and replaced everything. The job was finished in 48 hours. His son and neighbours were concerned by how quickly it was done and contacted Trading Standards. An investigation by Hertfordshire council’s Trading Standards service found that Vincent had grossly overcharged Boielle for the work, carried it out to a poor standard, and failed to provide information about the right to cancel. [5] Vincent was later sentenced to 28 months in prison after pleading guilty to fraud by false representation and engaging in unfair commercial practices. [5]
For Boielle, the ordeal continued after the roofing team left. Tiles were crooked and the wrong capping tiles had been fitted. The work had to be redone, and it took most of the next year to sort out. That lost year is the part no warranty can hand back.
Now the deadline, and it is a calendar one. The register of trusted traders is scheduled to go live this month, the point at which a promise becomes a product a household can actually open. Walker’s own framing sets the ceiling on it: a trusted mechanism, not a wall. The federation’s digital building passport, by contrast, has no launch date, which is its own answer about which team arrives first. By the end of this month, one side will have shipped a register, and the other will still have a proposal on paper.
Sources
1. Chartered Trading Standards Institute
2. National Federation of Builders