Good product. Cowboy launch.

SiteKiln was never meant to do this sort of thing. We write guides for people in the trade. But since the announcement there's been a fortnight of argument about this scheme, and almost none of it came from anyone who'd read the documents. The trade bodies said their piece on day one, fair enough. Then came the headlines, and social media accounts that either didn't understand it or were chasing engagement. Two people did ask him properly, a kitchen and bathroom trade magazine and a consumer journalist, and both did a good job. Neither asked a builder's questions. He tells us he's been through it privately with a number of builders, but none of that is anywhere you can read. So we took it on.

The short version, if you're on top of scaffolding.

• The product is good. It binds your customer as well as you, you set the stages, it does your admin, and it's £35 once.
• It isn't a crackdown on cowboys. It stops people paying for work that never happens. It doesn't check anyone's work.
• The minister described a customer's veto. What's been built is a referee.
• The government launched it with a cowboy hat and hasn't answered one of our questions since.
• The new terms put the 10% with the ombudsman. Cash is still murky.
• Rule of thumb: if you're on it, you're less likely to get stung. If your customer's on it, they're less likely to sting you.

The facts, the costs and the full list of what's still unknown are in our guide: Trusted Payments explained for builders. This is the other half: what we think.

Credit where it's due

James Walker, who owns Trusted Payments, didn't have to talk to us. He answered our emails back and forth from Georgia and Armenia, then gave us a long phone call on Friday 11 September, on the record. He was more candid than he needed to be, and before publishing we sent him the quotes most likely to be read in a way he didn't mean.

And to be clear about where we stand before anything else: we think the product is a good one. That is not the same as thinking it was sold well, and it isn't support for the government.

What people have been told, and what's true

Most of what's been said about this scheme in the last fortnight came from two places: the government, and social media. Neither read the documents.

The government sold it as a crackdown on cowboy builders, with a cowboy hat and a sound bite. More on that below.

Then social media did what it does with a headline. It's a way of stopping cash jobs. It's a window for HMRC. You'll lose your deposits. It'll cost the trade money. And what about cowboy customers? Ranted about everywhere, and as far as we can tell, never actually asked.

Here's what the documents and the man who built it actually say:

• Cash and HMRC: "The scheme is not to stop cash and we are totally independent of government and we don't share anything with them. The warranty only covers payments via the App as this proves the payment was made." His new terms, published the same day, ban agreeing to pay part of a job outside the app. Until that changes, we wouldn't take part-cash on a job that's on the app.
• Deposits: the 10% is the customer's money, held for the end of the job, not taken out of your deposit. You can set an upfront payment as a stage on day one, and it reaches you the next day. The contract muddles it by still calling the 10% a "deposit".
• Cost to the trade: £35 plus VAT, once per trade. The customer pays the fees on the stages agreed at the start. Add a stage after the job starts and, under the new terms, that fee is yours.
• The 100,000: trades who can get access through partner schemes like TrustMark, not trades using it. Asked whether 100,000 would be using it by the end of September, James said no.
• Cowboy customers: there's a blacklist. Trades who ignore an ombudsman decision are struck off, listed and reported to Trading Standards, and James says he's working on doing the same for customers.
• "Cowboy": the word appears nowhere in the company's own material. Not on its website, not in its terms, not in any of the four documents it sent us. It came from the government.

James's own view of the backlash is blunt. Asked for the strongest argument he'd heard against it: "I haven't heard one once, because what I've heard is misconception rather than reality." He thinks people do what everyone does with something new: "If we don't know what it is, we put it into a box of what we know... the trades put it into a box of going, no, I don't like that."

We'd go further. The misconceptions weren't the trade's fault. The government handed out a sound bite, social media ran with it, and the documents that answer every one of those fears are sitting in a trade guide that isn't on the company's homepage. That's a marketing problem, and the biggest part of it wasn't the company's doing.

But he's wrong that there wasn't a strong argument, and the FMB made it on the day. Brian Berry, its chief executive, called the announcement "a great move for the industry" and then said the thing everybody in the trade was thinking: "it is a real concern that this is just another voluntary programme without regulation behind it... In the long term the government should be looking at a compulsory licensing scheme for building companies." The National Federation of Builders was in the same place, with Richard Beresford saying he hoped it was "the first step to better-digitise industry".

Neither of those is a misconception. They are the correct question: does a voluntary scheme get used? And James has a straight answer to it: "I've got nothing against licensing. But unless you have a better system of protecting consumers in the now, licensing solves the problem of tomorrow, not today."

You can hold both. Berry is right that voluntary schemes struggle to get traction. James is right that a licence issued today does not stop a man walking off a job in March. Neither of them is the problem here. The problem is a government that launched it with a hat and a sound bite, while the document that answers half the argument sat unread.

It sorts people. It doesn't crack down on them.

James put the real target plainly: "The big problem that exists in the market, it's not payment, but it's payment in advance of work being done." That's the builder who takes the money and never turns up. It isn't the one who turns up and does a bad job, and nothing in the scheme checks anyone's work.

A rogue trader was never going to sign up to a payment trail and an ombudsman. A rogue customer won't either. When we put that to James he agreed, and added that for people who are on it, the contract makes it easier to recover the money. So the good trades and the good customers find each other inside it, and the rogues end up in a relationship all of their own.

That's also why we're behind the struck-off list. Trades who ignore an ombudsman decision, after an appeal, get removed and listed: "I'll list the directors and the companies that have been banned in the app." And customers? "I've got to check if I can do the same for consumers, but I can't see why not." When we raised GDPR: "I have found a way to deal with that."

The internet has been asking "what about cowboy customers?" since the day this was announced. So did a builder who rang Radio 4's You and Yours on 8 September: "Most builders, most good builders, will actually say that there are probably more bad customers than there are bad builders." The presenter's reply: "Yeah, we've heard that." This is the first thing in the whole package that answers him.

Make it obvious

The one thing we'd change tomorrow: the money at the end of a job is held by the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman, the same body that decides the disputes, and James sits on the board of both. Since 14 September that's in the contract too. He raised it himself, explained the ring-fence in his own words (it's in the guide), and put it simply: "If I was trying to hide something, I wouldn't be saying it now."

We believe him. But not hiding something and making it obvious aren't the same thing. He told us he doesn't know yet how transparent to make it on the website. Put it there, in plain words, where a builder will read it. This trade has had enough reasons to distrust schemes like this without adding one.

The announcement is the same problem in miniature. Five names went out with it: the Chief Ombudsman, his deputy, the chief executive of TrustMark, the chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, and a Trading Standards lead officer for doorstep crime and scams. If you know what those organisations are, that's a man thanking the people he had to build it with, and you can't build an ombudsman-backed warranty without the ombudsman. If you don't know what any of them are, and most builders won't, it reads as jobs for the boys.

Both readings were available and nobody said which one was true. So the trade picked, the way it picked on the deposits, the cash and the 10%. Every one of those was a fact that would have settled an argument, sitting in a document nobody was shown.

The same goes for the Chief Ombudsman, who also sits on the Trusted Payments board. James's answer is that he isn't involved in case work, and that there's an independent oversight committee. That's in the guide, and it belongs on the website.

Launched on Instagram. Answered by nobody.

On 28 August the government announced a crackdown on cowboy builders. The Prime Minister threw a cowboy hat on Instagram. The word "cowboy" appears nowhere in the company's own material. It came from the government. So did the promise of access for over 100,000 traders by the end of September, and when we asked the man who built the app whether 100,000 would be using it by then, he said no.

Eleven days later the minister responsible went on Radio 4 and told the country that 10% of her budget would be "held in escrow by the ombudsman and only released when I'm happy with the final result". The contract in force that day said Trusted Payments held the money, not the ombudsman. The contract in force now says that if the customer says nothing for 14 days, the job counts as complete, happy or not. Asked twice on air how a builder gets accredited, she couldn't set out a route.

Since then, the company has answered our questions line by line, rewritten its website and published a new contract. The department has said nothing. We put questions to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade in writing on 1 and 8 September, and copied the second to Kate Dearden MP, the Minister for Employment Rights and Consumer Protection herself. We asked for answers by 11 September. Neither has replied.

A founder answering our emails from Georgia and Armenia found the time. A government department with a press office hasn't.

And it's the government that decides what happens next. On Radio 4 the minister said the scheme is "voluntary at this stage", that "we want to see the uptake of the code, which I'm confident we will", and that "if it was mandatory, that would take a little bit more time". Then: "we won't hesitate to act further if we need to."

So here's the offer to the trade. Sign up to something voluntary, launched with a cowboy hat, by a government that has told you it will act if enough of you don't, and that hasn't answered a single question about any of it.

What we think

We think the product is good. Not the government's version of it: the thing itself, and what it would have been without a Prime Minister throwing a cowboy hat, and a Minister telling Radio 4 that her money would be "only released when I'm happy with the final result".

That sentence is the whole problem. It describes a customer's veto. What James has built is a referee: a decision that binds the customer as well as the trade, one snag list, and stages agreed before anyone picks up a tool. Not when you're happy. When it's fair.

It was sold the wrong way round because this kind of thing is always sold the wrong way round. We aren't political, and this isn't about one party. Small firms have spent years on the wrong end of rules written with somebody else in mind: IR35 in 2021, the rise in employer's National Insurance in 2025, and Making Tax Digital, legislated by one government and switched on by the next in April 2026. In the same stretch, homeowners were given up to 15 years to sue a builder over work that leaves a home unfit to live in. A builder chasing a homeowner who won't pay still has the small claims court. Governments have acted on late payment, but only when the one not paying is a bigger business.

Housing is the same story. When the government took office in July 2024 promising 1.5 million new homes, the industry welcomed the ambition and told it, in the same breath, what was missing. "Without a serious plan to boost the vocational skills system in this country, we'll be unable to deliver 1.5 million homes," Brian Berry of the Federation of Master Builders said that August. Noble Francis, economics director of the Construction Products Association, put it in six words: "There just won't be the people." By November Berry was pointing out that "the last time we built 300,000 homes a year was in 1969-70." The target was set anyway, and the trade was expected to deliver it. On 13 September this year, on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Angela Rayner, the cabinet minister responsible for housing, said there was now a "slim chance" of hitting it. She called it "a stretch target", put it down to "headwinds" internationally and construction costs, and said she wasn't giving up on it. The trade said so at the start. The people who set the target never had to find the people to build it. The trade did.

That's the pattern, and the distrust it breeds isn't just our opinion. It has been growing for forty years, whoever is in charge. In 1986, 40% of people trusted governments to put the country before their party "just about always" or "most of the time". In 2024, surveyed after the change of government, it was 12%, the lowest the British Social Attitudes survey has ever recorded. Ipsos found that 9% of people trusted politicians to tell the truth in 2023, under one party, and 9% again in 2025, under the other: the joint-lowest since it started asking in 1983. And fewer and fewer of the people writing the rules have done this kind of work. The House of Commons Library counted 98 MPs who had been manual workers in 1979, and 19 in 2015.

So anything with a government's name on it starts on the back foot, and a scheme launched with a sound bite and a cowboy hat on Instagram starts further back still. That isn't the product's fault. The product is good. It would have done far better with the government's sound bites nowhere near it.

So when a scheme finally comes along that protects the trade as well as the customer, it gets announced as a crackdown on the trade. No wonder people who've been in this game twenty years switched off before they'd read a word of it.

They are trying. The website has been rewritten more than once in a fortnight, the terms were with the lawyers the night before we spoke, and the new ones went up on 14 September. It's baby steps, and James would say that's how any new product goes: early adopters first, then the rest of the market in chunks.

That's the real gap. The product is at the start of the curve. The government sold it as the finish.

What has changed since our first piece

The company's homepage has been rewritten since our first piece. As of 11 September it says the Completion Payment is held by the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman, it takes Open Banking only with no card payments, fees are charged to the homeowner rather than the trade, the warranty lengths now agree with each other, and it says plainly that Trusted Payments isn't regulated by the FCA and isn't the insurer. And on 14 September new terms went up, version 2.6. They put the 10% with the Ombudsman in the contract itself, cut the negotiation window before a dispute goes to the Ombudsman from 45 days to 14 for both sides, and give a customer 14 days to sign off a finished job before it counts as complete.

And a few things from our first piece, put straight:

• The Prime Minister threw the hat. We said he held it up. That one's just wrong, and it's fixed.
• Deposits. We said "you get no money up front". Nothing we had said a stage could be paid before work starts, so we read the gap as a no, like everyone else did. James has since filled it: a first stage or a materials payment can be paid on day one and reach you the next day. It was the most frightening thing we printed, and it came from a gap in the documents, not from anything in them. Leave a blank unexplained and people fill it in, even people who've read every page.
• "Proof of funds before you lift a tool" overstated it. It's 10% of the job, not proof the customer has the rest. As James put it: "There's no proof of funds in the market at the moment."
• The fee. We reported £45 a project in the company's material and £35 on TrustMark's page. James says it's £35 plus VAT, once per trade, and that the customer's fee is a flat fee tiered by how much cover the job needs.

We've updated the first piece to match.

The last word, and it isn't ours

We asked James for one line he would say straight to a builder who has seen the headlines and already decided this isn't for him. This is the heart of what he sent:

"Trusted Payments is free, no resolution fees, no legal fees, binding decisions if you have an unreasonable customer, help recovering money and automatic invoicing and cashflow projections all manageable from WhatsApp for free."

Free means free to you on the stages you agree at the start. The customer pays those fees.

He also said this, and we think it is the more useful offer: he is happy to talk to any builder who has already decided against it, to explain it. If that is you, the argument you are having is with a headline, not with him. Go and have it with him instead.

Sources

The interview with James Walker (11 September 2026, on the record, recorded with his agreement once under way, nothing from the unrecorded first ten minutes quoted), the company's website and documents, and the law we checked are all listed in full in the guide. He replied to the quote check in writing, and where he reworded a quote we've used his wording. The Radio 4 quotes are from You and Yours, 8 September 2026, with timecodes in our first piece. IR35: our guide. Employer's National Insurance: HM Treasury, Autumn Budget 2024. Making Tax Digital: our guide. The 15-year limit: Building Safety Act 2022, section 135, read on legislation.gov.uk on 11 September 2026. Angela Rayner: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, BBC One, 13 September 2026, as reported by The Guardian the same day. Brian Berry on skills: Construction Wave, 1 August 2024. Noble Francis: writing on LinkedIn, as reported by Building, 15 July 2024. Brian Berry on 1969-70: Fix Radio, 13 November 2024. Trust in government: NatCen, British Social Attitudes 42, published June 2025, fieldwork 16 September to 27 October 2024. Trust in politicians: Ipsos Veracity Index 2025, fieldwork 5 to 11 November 2025. MPs who had been manual workers: House of Commons Library, "Social background of Members of Parliament 1979-2019", 15 February 2022.