Andy Burnham has a phrase for what he wants to do to rogue builders, and he used it more than once this week: put them out of business. The prime minister announced on 28 August that the government will launch a national database of trusted traders next month, alongside a payment protection system that holds customers’ money in an account and releases it in stages as project milestones are completed. GOV.UK and the BBC both covered the announcement, which also bundles in new curbs on aggressive bailiffs.
The scale problem is what makes this more than a press conference. The government cites a survey run for the Competition and Markets Authority suggesting customers lost more than £10bn in 2024 on home and garden services through losses, overcharging and unfair practices. Citizens Advice reports that home renovations are one of its single biggest sources of consumer complaints. More than a quarter of people who did home improvements in the past 18 months, ministers say, experienced problems such as builders vanishing after taking upfront payments.
Whether a voluntary database changes that is a fair question, and the industry itself is not short of answers. Adas Rico Wojtulewicz-Richmond, policy director at the National Federation of Builders, told BBC Breakfast that schemes to find trustworthy builders already exist and asked whether this one will stop bad actors, before answering his own question: “I don’t think it will.” His preferred fix is a project “passport” recording all work done on a job. The Chartered Trading Standards Institute struck a middle note, calling the scheme a great first step while urging a mandatory licence for anyone working in home repair and maintenance, which it says would make prosecution of fraudsters cheaper and simpler. CTSI’s chief executive John Herriman also warned that state-funded programmes like the Warm Homes Plan could create fresh hunting grounds for fraud, a concern with history behind it: major defects have been found in more than 30,000 houses linked to insulation schemes since 2022.
The Conservatives’ objection runs the other way. Shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith said the plan risks “piling more paperwork onto the majority of businesses who already do the right thing,” and that no app stops people who intend to defraud customers. The Liberal Democrats called the voluntary approach half-baked on the grounds that rogue operators will not sign up to a register designed to expose them.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the aim is to let people “spend their money with greater confidence and security.” Milestone payments are the genuinely novel part of the package, because they attack the moment where most of the damage happens: the upfront deposit. Everything else is a directory. Whether households remember this as the reform that fixed the trade or as another scheme that reputable builders had to enrol in will depend on enforcement nobody has yet described in detail.