When Jess Shaw’s father died in 2014 she used the inheritance to buy a fixer-upper — a terraced house in north London. She and her partner wanted a modest ground-floor extension and a general renovation. They interviewed a number of builders and didn’t take the cheapest quote — they went with the one recommended by a friend. Little did they know that they had hired a cowboy builder.
Red flags included curtain rails and door handles installed at wonky angles, grout spread over tiling and a light switch that never worked. The builders broke the bath while they were installing it. After a rainstorm the roof on the new extension leaked. Then one day the stench of sewage filled the living room. “Whenever I asked them to finish something, it was always, ‘No worries, I’ll send someone,’ ” recalls Shaw, 45. “And then nothing would happen.”
In desperation she cried down the phone to her mother’s electrician. He came round with his team of builders to inspect the work. They found live wires dangling in the walls and under the floorboards, wires taped together with masking tape, plug sockets wired incorrectly, uncapped pipes pumping sewage under the house, pipes running uphill, a gas leak in a poorly installed cooker, and appliances wired with the wrong ampage.
The initial builder’s quote had been £35,000, but the couple ended up paying him £50,000 — and then spent another £20,000 rectifying the problems. “I spent the rest of my savings,” says Shaw, who runs Pact Creative Training, a company team-building business.
“I have this strange middle-class thing that my mother taught me: be nice to people and they will be nice back. But sometimes they just see you coming,” Shaw says. “We didn’t tell them to get lost quick enough and we ended up paying them all but the last £3,000.”
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It turns out that her friend who made the recommendation had been taken in too — she needed rewiring done. What lesson did Shaw learn? To go with her gut. “Of all the builders we had around, I liked him the least. There was something about his manner I didn’t like. But he said he would do so many things for us, and my friend’s recommendation made me complacent.” The most galling part of the story is that he is still in business and listed on one of the popular builder comparison websites.
Britain is rife with cowboy builders, but their days could be numbered. A private member’s bill calling for the mandatory licensing of construction companies, introduced by the Conservative MP Mark Garnier, is being debated in parliament today. Anyone in Britain can call themselves a builder without having to demonstrate any training, qualifications or experience. The only consumer protection is contract law, which is so complex and expensive that most victims take their losses instead. If the bill becomes law, builders would have to be licensed and subject to a complaints system for substandard work. Penalties would include loss of licences and paying compensation to consumers.
About time too, says Brian Berry, the chief executive of the Federation of Master Builders (FMB), which is backing the bill. The FMB’s research reveals that 55 per cent of home improvers have had a negative experience with their builder, and 32 per cent of homeowners have put off doing works for fear of hiring a dodgy builder; even 77 per cent of small and medium-sized building businesses want mandatory licensing because it will improve the industry’s reputation and stop reputable builders from being undercut by cowboys. “Until now the building industry didn’t want to be burdened with regulations, but after [the] Grenfell [fire disaster] the narrative has changed,” Berry says.
What exactly constitutes a rogue builder? “Someone whose work doesn’t comply with building regulations and is unsafe; someone who doesn’t offer a contract when you ask for one; someone who liquidates their company and sets up under a new name; someone who leaves the consumer without the promised end result; someone who misleads the customer or is incompetent,” says Berry, who notes that builders must have licences to work in the US and Australia.
Ruth Bradford must have wished she lived in one of those countries. In 2018 she and her husband bought a 1930s semi in Bristol — their first house — and in July 2019 hired a garden-room company to build a 9.25 sq m extension off the back of the kitchen. They were quoted £25,000 and the company owner said that the job would take six to nine weeks. In the end it took 16 months before Bradford had to hire another builder to finish the job in time for the birth of her second child. Three months was lost because of the first lockdown, but even so Bradford felt misled.
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“There were times builders would turn up for maybe a day or two a week at most, then some weeks not at all,” she says. “They were on other jobs. The company owner told me to my face that any client who had ‘kicked off’ about work delays was now bottom of his list. The contractors who were on site told us he does this to everyone. He promises clients the job will be done in six to nine weeks and then takes a year.”
The build took its toll on the family’s mental health. For several months they had no working kitchen or running water downstairs. Bradford, a self-employed graphic designer, was pregnant at the time and was up and down stairs all day to fill the kettle in the upstairs bathroom and had to do the washing-up in the bath. Their cooker was a camping stove on a shelf in the living room.
Twice building control inspectors demanded work be corrected: the foundations were not dug deep enough and an air brick wasn’t installed for ventilation, a flaw the builder refused to remedy, so Bradford couldn’t get the works signed off. At that point they hired their previous landlord, also a builder, to finish the work, and are refusing to pay the first builder’s final invoice of £4,000 for work he hasn’t completed. They have paid him £27,000.
“There needs to be regulation,” Bradford says. “I could just buy a van, put up some Google reviews and call myself a builder. It makes me feel sick what we went through. It still affects me emotionally. Something needs to be done.”
