At the end of August the Government announced a package of measures aimed at what it called cowboy builders, including a new Approved Code for home improvement businesses and a Trusted Payments app that holds a homeowner’s money and releases it as the work reaches agreed milestones. The Federation of Master Builders (FMB) welcomed the announcement, while raising the question a lot of people in the sector are quietly asking, which is whether voluntary measures will go far enough.
It’s a fair question, and the FMB is far from the only organisation asking it.
At Diversity Customer Management we’re passionate about improving standards across the construction industry and supporting anything that gives customers more confidence in the businesses they choose. Like the FMB, we’re a TrustMark scheme provider, so this is a debate we have a stake in. Higher standards also help reputable tradespeople and building companies show the quality of their work and compete on a fairer footing, which matters just as much.
What has actually been announced
The measures announced on 28 August cover home improvement work alongside a separate set of changes to bailiff regulation. For anyone working in domestic construction, three things stand out:
• An Approved Code for home improvement businesses, setting higher expectations on customer service, transparency and dispute resolution, which should be fully operational by December 2026.
• A Trusted Payments app, launched in early September, which holds funds and releases them in stages as work is signed off. More than 100,000 traders were expected to have access by the end of the month.
• A wider review of the consumer protection landscape, bringing in Citizens Advice, Trading Standards, regulators and redress schemes.
The numbers behind it are worth sitting with:
• 🏡 More than one in four UK adults have had problems with home improvement work in the past 18 months
• 💷 37% faced unexpected costs, at an average loss of £750 each
• £10.3 billion was lost in 2024 to unfair practices in home and garden maintenance
There’s a collective call for change
The push for something firmer than voluntary measures has been building for years, and it isn’t coming only from campaigners. FMB research found that 86% of builders want the Government to introduce a scheme, which cuts against the assumption that regulation is something the industry has to be dragged into. Builders already doing things properly tend to want the bar raised.
It isn’t a new idea either, and it has never belonged to one organisation. Back in 2019 a Construction Licensing Task Force chaired by Liz Peace CBE pulled together the Chartered Institute of Building, RICS, the Electrical Contractors Association, the Glass and Glazing Federation and FENSA, Local Authority Building Control, the British Property Federation, the Construction Products Association, the Association for Consultancy and Engineering, TrustMark and Which? Trusted Traders.
More recently, Citizens Advice published Built to Fail in July, which found that 28% of people hiring a tradesperson for home repairs ran into problems, with median losses of £750 and 11% losing more than £5,000, and backed mandatory licensing off the back of it.
We’d add ourselves to that list. As a TrustMark Scheme Provider and trade accreditation specialist, we assess and monitor installers against TrustMark standards and handle complaints when a job hasn’t gone to plan, so we see both ends of this, the businesses investing in doing it right and the homeowners who find out too late that theirs didn’t.
What homeowners themselves say
TrustMark has just published a report, Consumer Protection in Home Improvements, based on research by Eureka! Research with 1,515 homeowners. Rather than asking the industry what protection ought to look like, it asked homeowners what they think it means when they’re having work done at home. The findings are uncomfortable reading in places:
• Seven in ten choose a tradesperson on a recommendation from friends or family
• Around two thirds don’t recall getting a formal contract before work started
• 73% wouldn’t know who to contact if a problem came up
• 87% would like one trusted place to go for information
• 78% support a single kitemark quality standard for tradespeople, and 68% think a government backed scheme would give them greater protection
Almost all of that sits at the very start of a project, well before there’s a complaint to make. If someone doesn’t know what protection they have before the first invoice, an app that stages payments helps, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem of how people choose who to let into their home in the first place.
Building safety reform, and the everyday work underneath it
None of this is happening in isolation. The Government is already progressing significant reform of building safety and construction regulation, including plans for a Single Construction Regulator, following recommendations from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. That work is designed to reduce fragmentation in the regulatory system and improve standards across buildings, construction products and professionals, and it’s vital, because the consequences of failures in building safety can be devastating.
As the industry works through those critical safety concerns, though, it would be easy to lose sight of the standards homeowners experience on everyday domestic work. Extensions, renovations, repairs and home improvements don’t carry the same regulatory profile as higher risk buildings, but for the people commissioning them they’re a significant financial and emotional investment, often the biggest one they’ll make after buying the house itself.
Domestic construction deserves attention too
There’s a longstanding gap the sector has been pointing at for years: there is currently no minimum competence requirement simply to call yourself a builder and start operating a building company. That leaves homeowners trying to tell the difference between reputable professionals and operators who don’t work to the same standards, usually with nothing to go on beyond a website and a word of mouth recommendation.
It affects the many excellent builders and tradespeople doing things properly too. Reputable businesses invest in skills, training, quality, processes and customer service, and when others can operate without comparable standards or accountability, those businesses end up competing against lower prices that don’t reflect the same level of professionalism or protection.
So raising standards isn’t simply about protecting consumers from poor quality work, it’s about supporting good builders and creating a more level playing field.
The role of accreditation and recognised standards
We see the value that recognised standards and accreditation bring every day. Effective frameworks help businesses demonstrate their commitment to quality, and they give customers real reassurance when they’re deciding who to trust with work in their homes.
A simple route for homeowners doesn’t mean one scheme for everything, and it shouldn’t. Trade and product specific schemes do a job a general standard can’t, because they get into whether an installer has actually been trained on the product going into someone’s house and whether they’re being reassessed on it. We run two that show the range. The VELUX Certified Installer Partnership brings installers together around a manufacturer’s products and training, so a homeowner having roof windows fitted knows the person doing it has been assessed on that specific work. The Home Adaptations Installer Network, which we created with Foundations, gives local authorities a list of contractors who are assessed, DBS checked and TrustMark registered for home adaptations work, where the people commissioning it are often older or disabled and the stakes of getting it wrong are higher than usual.
Neither of those replaces a clear front door for homeowners, they sit underneath it, and that’s the shape we’d want any future system to take.
Voluntary schemes make an important contribution, and the Approved Code should add to that. The question raised at the end of August, whether voluntary measures alone can close the wider regulatory gap, is still the right one for the industry to work through. Any future approach needs to be effective and proportionate, and it has to stay accessible to the thousands of smaller businesses and sole traders who make up such a large part of UK construction.
The objective shouldn’t be to create unnecessary barriers for good businesses, it should be to make it easier for quality businesses to demonstrate their standards and harder for poor quality operators to undermine them.
Our view is that the route to success is organisations working together against agreed measures, rather than each scheme, accreditation and app pulling in its own direction. There will always be nuances by trade and project type, but base measures can be agreed centrally and then tailored, which is what gives homeowners a simple way to find a licensed tradesperson and a consistent experience from start to finish.
Protecting homeowners and reputable builders
For over 25 years, DCM has worked within the construction sector, helping brands and businesses build stronger relationships with tradespeople and consumers. What that’s reinforced, more than anything, is that trust sits underneath every part of a good customer experience.
Homeowners need confidence that the people coming into their homes are competent, accountable and committed to doing quality work. Reputable builders deserve an environment where their professionalism is recognised rather than undercut by people operating below expected standards. Those two things are the same problem viewed from different ends.
The current focus on raising standards across construction is welcome, and it’s encouraging to see the Government, TrustMark, Citizens Advice and the wider sector mainly pointing the same way. The next challenge is making sure those ambitions are felt right through the industry, from complex higher risk buildings to the everyday domestic projects happening in homes across the country.
Better standards should protect customers, reward reputable businesses and strengthen trust in construction as a whole, and that’s an outcome worth building towards.
Contact us today to start shaping your project.