"We wanted to act quickly." "It's time someone took this on."

Kate Dearden MP, Minister for Employment Rights and Consumer Protection, on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours, 8 September 2026, at 19:26: "We wanted to act quickly." The Prime Minister, on Instagram on 28 August, holding up a cowboy hat: "It's time someone took this on."

This article is about the fortnight in between.

The short version, if you are stood on a roof.

• The good bit is real. The customer's money for the end of the job is paid in before you start, and held. Proof of funds before you lift a tool is something domestic builders have wanted for twenty years.
• The 10% is not a deposit paid to you. Your customer pays it to Trusted Payments when the job is agreed, and you get it at the end. You get no money up front. If you have priced a job assuming otherwise, reprice it.
• You get paid when the customer ticks the job complete in the app. There is no deadline on them doing that. "A reasonable time" is not defined anywhere in the contract.
• If they go quiet, clause 14.2 gives you 45 days of failed negotiation before the ombudsman can be asked to look. The page promoting the scheme says 14 days. Those are not the same.
• The fee is £45 a project in the company's own material and £35 on TrustMark's public page. Get it confirmed in writing before you quote.
• None of it is compulsory. No licence, no register, no qualification. And the scheme's own onboarding form says it does not inspect your work and that registration is not a guarantee of workmanship. That is honest. It is also not what the announcement said.

Everything below is the evidence for those six things. It takes a while, because somebody had to read the contract.

On 28 August 2026 the government announced what every headline since has called a crackdown on cowboy builders. Three things were announced. A payment and milestone app for home improvement jobs, called Trusted Payments. A code of conduct for home improvement traders, the Approved Code, run by the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. And accreditation of private bailiffs, which is the only compulsory measure in the package and has nothing to do with builders.

Nothing announced that day makes anything compulsory for a builder. Not a licence, not a register, not a qualification. The app was to go live within a week, with access for over 100,000 traders by the end of September. The Approved Code launches this autumn and is meant to be fully live by December.

There is a licensing bill before Parliament, and it is worth knowing it exists. The Domestic Building Works (Consumer Protection) Bill would let the Secretary of State bring in a licensing scheme for domestic building work by regulations. It is a private member's bill, sponsored by Mark Garnier MP, it had its first reading on 22 June 2026, and its second reading is listed for 5 February 2027. It is a repeat of an earlier attempt that failed, and private members' bills with second readings that far out almost never become law. So licensing was not an unthought-of option. It is sitting on the order paper, and the government announced a voluntary code instead.

The problem being addressed is real and the government's own figures are not the part to argue with. Of the people who had home improvement work done in the past eighteen months, more than one in four had a problem with it. More than a third of those faced extra costs, losing £750 on average. GOV.UK puts the 2024 net monetised detriment for home and garden maintenance services at £10.3 billion. Nobody in the trade is going to defend that.

The question is who ends up carrying the fix.

A note on what we have seen. Trusted Payments has been good enough to talk to us on the record and to send advance copies of the trade and consumer material it is preparing. We quote from those below. They are not published yet, so the final versions may differ from what we were sent, and we will say so if they do. It is worth saying up front that on a first reading the thing being described in them is genuinely not all bad. It is the presentation of it, and the speed at which a government put its name to it, that this article is about.

A note on timing. Everything below describes the scheme's documents as they stood on 8 September 2026, the day this was written. Every quote is taken from copies we captured and hashed that day, so the comparison can still be made later. Trusted Payments has told us its terms are being amended shortly. We have not been given a date and we are not going to guess at one. So some of what follows may be fixed by the time you read it. When we have seen the new version we will say plainly what changed and what did not, including anything that turns out to have been put right. The company has answered us, has offered a call, and told us about the amendment before we asked, none of which it had to do.

Start with what it does, because a lot of it is good

Before any of the criticism, here is the thing being described, because most of it is what small building firms have been asking for.

Proof that the customer's money exists before you start. Milestones you set yourself, agreed with the customer up front. Variations handled in an app instead of an argument on site. An insurance-backed warranty. A route to an independent decision when a customer will not pay, with no solicitor and no fee. Invoicing that pushes into Xero. The whole thing run from WhatsApp, so there is no new system to learn.

That is a list twenty years old. Domestic builders have wanted every item on it for as long as anyone has been asking them what they want. If it works the way it is described, the trade should want it to succeed, and so should we.

So this is not an article arguing that the scheme should not exist. It is an article about what happened next.

What happened next

On Tuesday 8 September, BBC Radio 4's You and Yours devoted its phone-in to getting building work done. Kate Dearden MP, Minister for Employment Rights and Consumer Protection, was interviewed about it. The National Federation of Builders' Director of Policy took questions live. Working builders and homeowners rang in.

And one sentence from the minister, at 21:19, answered a question the scheme's own contract leaves unanswered.

"So for example, to kick off my basement conversion, I have a retention payment, first and foremost. So 10% of my overall budget will be held in escrow by the ombudsman and only released when I'm happy with the final result."

Read that last clause again. Only released when I'm happy with the final result.

Why that sentence matters more than the announcement

She calls it a retention. Not a deposit, not a staged payment, not a holdback. The word the commercial side of this industry has spent twenty years campaigning to abolish, used by the responsible minister to describe the domestic version, while Parliament is legislating to ban it in commercial contracts.

That is not a proposal. The Commercial Payments Bill is a government bill, already through committee stage in the Lords as of 21 July 2026, and its long title says in terms that it is a bill "to ban retention clauses in the construction sector". It inserts new sections into the Construction Act that make retention clauses void after a transition period, and it goes further than voiding them: a new section 113E entitles the unpaid party to a penalty of the higher of £40 or 50 per cent of the retention debt, on top of statutory interest.

So Parliament's current view of withholding a retention, on the commercial side, is that it should be void and carry a 50 per cent penalty. On the domestic side, a retention is the thing the minister is describing on the radio as a feature.

She says the money sits in escrow with the ombudsman. That is worth holding up against the paperwork, and against what the company's own website used to say.

What the website said, and what it says now

On 1 September we put these points to Trusted Payments in writing, asking for a full written response by 5pm on 11 September.

We are publishing before that date because the minister was on national radio today, and because the company has already answered in part. It has spoken to us on the record, sent advance copies of its material, offered a call this Friday and told us, before we asked, that its terms are being amended. None of that was owed to us. Its full response is still to come and we will publish it in full and unedited when it arrives, alongside anything in this article that it changes.

On that date, its homepage said the company was "not a bank, not FCA-authorised, and does not hold client money". It said "retention is held by the Ombudsman in an independent trust account". It said the company had "no access to, and no control over" that money.

Those sentences are no longer on the homepage. They had gone by 3 September, and they were still gone when we checked at 06:27 this morning. We captured the page on 1, 3 and 8 September and hashed each copy, and the 1 September version is in the Wayback Machine, so anyone can read what was published at the time we asked.

We are not going to tell you what to make of that. What we will say is that the contract has not changed. Clause 6.2 of version 2.5 today reads exactly as it read on 1 September:

6.2 Once a Related Services Agreement is agreed, you must pay the Final Payment Amount (10% of the contract) through the App. We will hold it in the Trusted Payments client protection account under these terms. Please see clause 3.4.

We. Not the Ombudsman. In the Trusted Payments client protection account.

That is the same 10% the minister described on Tuesday as held in escrow by the ombudsman.

One more thing from this morning's capture. The government said on 28 August that the app would go live "next week", with over 100,000 traders able to access it before the end of September. As of 06:27 today, the Trusted Payments homepage invites you to "subscribe to the waitlist and get notified about the upcoming release of the new Trusted Payments platform".

Deposit or retention? The contract says both

Reporting of this scheme has described a 10% deposit paid at the start of a job. The minister described the 10% as a retention, held in escrow, released on completion.

Those are not the same arrangement. In the first, the builder gets 10% up front to get going and buy materials. In the second, 10% is withheld from him until the customer is satisfied.

It is neither. Here is clause 3.4 of version 2.5, the version live as this was written:

3.4 Final Payment Monies. Once the Related Services Agreement is agreed, you will pay a deposit of 10% of the amount due under it. We will hold this in our client protection account under these Terms.

The customer pays it, at the start, to Trusted Payments, who keep it. It never reaches the builder to get going with. It is not withheld from his stage payments as the job proceeds, because it was never in his hands to be withheld from. It is the final 10% of the job, funded on day one, and parked.

That is better than the coverage suggests in one way and worse in another. Better, because the money demonstrably exists before anybody lifts a tool. Worse, because the builder has no deposit at all. The first money he actually receives is the first stage payment, after he has done the first stage.

And on what to call it, the contract cannot make its mind up. One 10% sum carries four descriptions in the same document.

That last one treats a retention and a deposit as two possible things, in a document where there is only ever one 10% sum. "Retention Amount" appears four times and is defined nowhere.

If you are pricing a job on the assumption of money up front, you are pricing it wrong.

The release condition, and the deadline that is not there

Ten per cent of the job, released when the customer is happy. Put that against clause 4.4, where the same idea appears in the contract:

4.4 Completion. The Contractor must record the project timelines and stages in the App, including any snagging periods. The Related Services count as completed on the date the Contractor fully carries them out and you report them as 'complete' in the App (the 'Completion Date'). The Contractor can provide all necessary documents as part of Completion. If the consumer does not sign off in a reasonable time then the Contractor shall contact Trusted Payments and request escalation to the Ombudsman.

Both. Finishing the job is not, on its own, completing it. The customer has to press the button.

And "a reasonable time" is not defined anywhere in the document. No number, no period, nothing binding the customer to a deadline of any kind. The phrase appears twice in the whole contract, and the other appearance is boilerplate about the Consumer Rights Act 2015 describing the contractor's obligations, not the customer's.

Then clause 14.2:

14.2 If the matter is not resolved by negotiation within forty-five (45) days of receiving a written invitation to negotiate, then (subject to clause 14.4 in the case of fraud) you may escalate it to the DRO.

Forty-five days of failed negotiation before the ombudsman can be asked to look.

That is not what the scheme's own promotion says. TrustMark's page for homeowners, captured this morning, describes the same step like this:

"What if my trade and I disagree? Raise it with your trade first and give them 14 days to respond. If that doesn't resolve it, bring it to us and we will pass it to the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman."

Fourteen days on the page selling it. Forty-five in the contract that binds it. We are quoting both and leaving the reader to weigh them, because that is all anyone can honestly do with two documents that do not agree.

So the minister's "when I'm happy" and the contract's "reports them as complete" are the same event. Neither has a deadline attached.

To be fair to her, she was describing the scheme from the homeowner's side, and from that side it is a genuinely good feature. This is not a suggestion that she was evasive or that she got it wrong. That is precisely the point. She described the mechanism accurately, on national radio, and the effect on the person who has done the work did not come up, because in the design of this scheme that person's position has not been considered.

The customer's cost of not pressing the button is nothing. No fee, no form, no deadline, no consequence. The builder's cost of getting his own money released is a written process, an ombudsman referral, and however long that takes, on money he has already earned by doing the work.

"Voluntary at this stage"

The second thing worth taking from the interview is what the government means by voluntary. Asked why the scheme is not mandatory, at 19:26:

"We wanted to act quickly, which is why we announced this code, the Trusted Payments app, and why it's voluntary at this stage, because we want to make sure that people have that choice now."

Then at 19:36:

"If it was mandatory, that would take a little bit more time. But it doesn't mean to say that we won't act further if we need to. We want to see the uptake of the code, which I'm confident we will."

And closing the interview, at 22:17:

"As I've said at the start, at this stage, it's voluntary, but we won't hesitate to act further if we need to."

Mandatory was not rejected on principle. It was rejected on timing. The government has said twice in five minutes that it will act further if it decides it needs to, and that it is watching uptake to decide.

The honest reading of "voluntary", then, is: voluntary for now, and they are counting how many of you join.

That is not speculation. It is the minister's stated position, said at the start of the interview and again at the end, unprompted. So when you decide whether to sign up, understand what you are deciding. Not whether to join a voluntary scheme, but whether to join early, or wait and see whether the terms improve before something firmer arrives.

There is a second reason voluntary does less work than it sounds. Voluntary means the law does not require it. It does not mean the market will not. The moment government tells homeowners to look for a badge, every builder without one is answering a question they have never had to answer before. "Are you on the Approved Code?" No is a perfectly good answer. It is also a longer conversation than yes, it happens on the doorstep or in the quote, and it happens against a competitor who has already answered it. Nobody gets fined. You just lose slightly more jobs than you used to, for a reason that has nothing to do with the standard of your work.

The question asked twice, and not answered

The most revealing moment was not about money.

The presenter asked, plainly, how a builder actually gets accredited. At 18:14:

"So here am I. I'm a builder, and I am looking for this new government approved accreditation. How do I go about that, and who exactly is going to accredit me?"

The answer moved on to the payment system. He came back to it at 18:40, going out of his way to be fair:

"I'll come on to that, the trusted payment system. What I want to know is, how exactly will you accredit me? I'm not trying to trip you up here or say it won't work. I'm just trying to understand. If I'm a builder, how exactly will this new scheme accredit me in a way that will protect people who might be inclined to hire me? Could you just explain that for me, the nuts and bolts of it?"

The answer, in full, at 18:55:

"So the code will be approved through trading standards, and businesses who then said they've signed up to the code will have to demonstrate that they are able to meet those higher standards, transparency and customer service through their work. But if people have been found to perhaps not abide by the code, there'll be really clear detriments."

Read that as a builder who wants to sign up tomorrow morning. There is no route in it. No application process, no assessment method, no criteria, no cost, no timescale, and no explanation of what "demonstrate" involves or who does the checking.

That is not an unfair reading of one flustered answer. We went looking for the route ourselves. What exists today is a page at homeimprovementcode.com where a business can register its interest and receive further information about the scheme. An expression of interest is not an application. The assessing body, the criteria, the cost to a sole trader, the decision time and the appeal route on refusal are, as far as we can establish, unpublished.

The government wants over 100,000 traders with access by the end of this month.

One detail about how that interview reached air. The minister's contribution was pre-recorded, and the programme said so. Which means that when the National Federation of Builders said on the same programme that it could not tell how the dispute process works, what it costs or how long it takes, and when a working builder rang in to say he would not put money through a government-approved scheme after what he had seen government-approved installers do, there was nobody from the government in the room to answer them. Fair questions, asked in good faith on a national consumer programme, went to an empty chair.

The answer that exists, in a document nobody has published

A distinction first, because two things are being run together. The Approved Code is the code of conduct, run by the Ombudsman with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. Trusted Payments is the app. The presenter was asking about the Code, and the route into that is still, as far as we can establish, unpublished.

But there is an onboarding document for the app, and Trusted Payments sent us an advance copy of it this week. It is two pages, and it is clear.

If you are already a member of TrustMark, BALI, Book a Builder, Buy with Confidence or Trusted Traders, it says, "you do not need to be checked", and you can ask for an instant sign up link. If you are not, you provide photo ID for the owner or a director, your company number, or for a sole trader your name, date of birth and home address, your trading address, your public liability insurance and employers' liability if you have staff, any trade registration numbers such as Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, MCS or OFTEC "if you have them", and your VAT number if you are registered.

Then four declarations. Have you been disqualified or struck off as a company director. Has anyone else who owns or runs the business. Have you or they been involved in an insolvency. And have you or your business ever been removed or turned down by a trade scheme or trade body.

That is a reasonable set of checks on a person and a business, and any builder could have been walked through it in ninety seconds on the radio.

Then comes the most honest paragraph in the entire package, under the heading "One thing we do not do":

"We do not inspect your work, and we will never tell a customer that we have. Our checks are about who you are and whether your business is sound. What speaks for the quality of your work is your record on the platform, stage by stage, signed off by the people who paid for it."

And at the foot of the same page, in grey: "Registration is not a guarantee of workmanship."

Read that next to a video of the Prime Minister holding up a cowboy hat, captioned "It's time someone took this on".

The company is being straight with the trade. It says what it does, which is check who you are and whether your business is sound. It says what it does not do, which is inspect anyone's work. Both are reasonable, both are clearly written, and together they describe something useful.

They do not describe a crackdown on cowboy builders. And as far as we can see, nobody at Trusted Payments has ever said they do.

There is one snag in it, and it is worth naming because it is the same fault the whole story keeps turning up. That promise, "we will never tell a customer that we have", is made in the document the builder reads. The document the homeowner reads opens with "Your installer is market leading and backed by Trusted Payments", and goes on: "Your invitation to use Trusted Payments is your invitation to the highest standard of professionalism in home improvement."

Nobody there is claiming to have inspected anything, and that is the promise as written. But market leading and highest standard of professionalism are claims about quality, made to the customer, about a trader the company has told the trader it does not assess for quality. The two documents are describing the same builder to two different audiences, and they are not saying the same thing about him.

What "government approved" is currently worth

That builder's objection deserves to be taken seriously rather than filed as cynicism, because he brought receipts.

"I've just been to look at a building which is wringing wet with damp, a lovely old 150 year old brick built building, which a government approved installer put insulation in the walls, which has now basically written off the building. I can get it out, but it's a huge expense."

"I also looked at a roof last year which is now caving in because all the timbers have gone rotten, because it had a government approved and paid for scheme to spray foam insulation inside the roof."

"But I see people all the time who said, oh, they was on this site and it came and he had the government stickers."

He is not describing isolated bad luck. In October 2025 the National Audit Office reported on insulation installed under ECO4 and the Great British Insulation Scheme, government schemes delivered by government-approved installers. It found that 98 per cent of external wall insulation installations had major issues requiring remediation, between 22,000 and 23,000 homes, along with 29 per cent of internal wall insulation, another 9,000 to 13,000. A subset posed immediate health and safety risks: insufficient boiler ventilation, boiler flues too close to openings, exposed live electrical cabling.

The NAO's explanation was not rogue operators. It was limited government oversight, a department running the system at arm's length without the in-house technical expertise to check it, fragmented roles across five or six bodies, and insufficient auditing. Separately, Ofgem estimated that businesses may have claimed between £56 million and £165 million on the basis of falsified claims covering between 5,600 and 16,500 homes.

In January 2026 the Public Accounts Committee reported. Its chair called a 98 per cent failure rate "the most catastrophic fiasco that I have seen on this Committee", and the report found the project "doomed to failure from the start", with more than 30,000 homes left defective. By mid-September 2025, nearly a year after the problems surfaced, fewer than one in ten of those homes had been found and fixed.

Then the part that should stop any homeowner reading this. Remediation is the installer's liability, and where the installer has gone under, a guarantee covers costs up to £20,000. The Committee said it is aware of cases with damage worth over £250,000, and that households "do not have real assurance that they will be covered".

Hold that £20,000 in mind. It is also the warranty maximum in the Trusted Payments contract, at clause 8.7.

Ofgem has written to all 60,000 consumers who had solid wall insulation under those schemes. Spray foam, his other example, was funded under the Green Homes Grant and continues under ECO4. Around 250,000 UK homes have it. Roughly a quarter of mortgage lenders will lend against it, no equity release provider will, and there is no government funding to remove it.

The body that oversees installations under those schemes is TrustMark, described by government as its endorsed quality scheme. It is running the remediation programme, called Find and Fix, and by mid-September 2025 it had fully remediated 2,934 homes.

And TrustMark is the way into the new scheme

This is the part that has not been reported anywhere we can find.

TrustMark has partnered with Trusted Payments. Its own site says so: "TrustMark has partnered with Trusted Payments to help TrustMark Registered Businesses offer homeowners a more secure, transparent way to pay for home improvement work."

More usefully for anyone deciding whether to join, TrustMark publishes what it costs. Under the heading "What does it cost?", on its own homeowner page, captured this morning:

"Projects carry a £35 project fee, which can be passed on to the consumer. Projects under £2,000 have a lower fee. There is a fee up to £4 per transaction."

The phrase to notice is "which can be passed on to the consumer". Remember what the National Federation of Builders said on the programme: "There is gonna be a cost to joining. And if the customer brings in the contractor, they will bear that cost. And so it'll put the price of the job up." The scheme's own page says the same thing, out loud, as a feature. It is a modest cost on an extension and a less modest one across a run of small jobs, and no coverage of this scheme has mentioned it once.

Except the figure on that page is not the figure in the company's own material. The advance copies sent to us are consistent with each other: the homeowner guide carries "£45 per project, plus payment fees" on its front page, and the trade guide says "the £45 project fee is added to your quote automatically, so they pay it, not you", with a separate one-off £35 plus VAT for the builder's first project. So the trade guide's "no project fees" badge means no project fees for you, which is fair enough.

What does not reconcile is the public page. TrustMark, today, says £35 and says it can be passed to the consumer. The company's material says £45 and says the customer pays it. Somebody's customer is going to be quoted the wrong number. Get it confirmed in writing before you price a job on this.

None of this means TrustMark caused the insulation failures, and it is the body cleaning them up. But it does answer the question underneath the builder's objection. What does a government-endorsed badge assure a homeowner? On the most recent large-scale evidence in this exact market, under this exact oversight architecture, and with the same £20,000 cap sitting behind the new scheme: considerably less than the homeowner assumed.

The retention nobody in the coverage mentioned

Here is the part that should genuinely annoy anyone who works in construction.

While a retention is being introduced into domestic work, Parliament is banning it in commercial work. The government consulted on two ways of dealing with construction retentions, in "Late payments: tackling poor payment practices", which ran from 31 July to 23 October 2025. Option A: prohibit retention clauses outright. Option B: allow retentions to continue, but require the withheld money to be protected, either by segregation in a separate bank account or through an instrument of guarantee.

In its response of 24 March 2026 the government chose Option A. Holding the money safely with an independent third party was on the table, was consulted on, and was not the option taken forward for commercial construction. Some respondents preferred it. The government went further.

Now read the minister's description again. Ten per cent held in escrow by the ombudsman, released when the customer is happy. That is Option B, or on the contract wording something slightly weaker than Option B. Either way it is the model the government examined and passed over for the commercial side of the industry, turning up on the domestic side with a government press release behind it.

The usual defence of a scheme like this is that the money is safe because an independent third party holds it rather than the customer. That defence does not survive contact with the consultation, because independent protection of the money is exactly what Option B offered, and it still lost.

And the domestic side may not even get the ban. The prohibition is being written into Part II of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, the Construction Act. Section 106 of that Act reads:

This Part does not apply to a construction contract with a residential occupier... A construction contract with a residential occupier means a construction contract which principally relates to operations on a dwelling which one of the parties to the contract occupies, or intends to occupy, as his residence.

In plain English, the extension you are building for Mrs Jones.

On the face of it, the retention ban does not reach domestic work at all, because the ban is being inserted into the Part that section 106 switches off for exactly that kind of job.

This is not a new unfairness. It is an old one nobody mentions. Working directly for a homeowner, a builder already has no statutory right to interim payments, no payment notice or pay less notice regime, no right to suspend the works for non-payment under section 112, and no right to statutory adjudication under section 108. All of it is switched off by section 106. He has his contract and the ordinary law of debt, and that is the lot.

So the domestic builder never had the Construction Act's payment protections, is not obviously getting the retention ban, and is now being offered a retention instead.

To be straight about the limits of that: the government has said it will consult further on implementation, so the final scope is not settled, and we could find nothing published that addresses the residential occupier exclusion by name in either direction. What nobody should do is assume the ban will cover domestic work. Nothing published so far says it will.

The trade body's verdict, and its alternative

Rico Wojtulewicz, Director of Policy at the National Federation of Builders, took questions live on the same programme. On who the scheme will reach:

"The people that we're really trying to tackle are not gonna use the scheme."

On where the cost lands:

"There is gonna be a cost to joining. And if the customer brings in the contractor, they will bear that cost. And so it'll put the price of the job up."

On the package as a whole:

"I think really this is a baby step, because we welcome it... but a lot of the stuff is already going on."

And:

"It just, unfortunately, penalises the best."

He made the retention point independently:

"It's strange irony here that the government is actually removing what's called retention, so money is retained at the beginning to make sure works are done to a good level. They're removing it for the broader industry and now they're reintroducing it for this."

To be precise, because the two policies are not in direct collision: section 106 means commercial and domestic work sit on separate tracks. What survives that qualification is the reasoning. The government consulted on allowing retentions provided the money was independently protected, judged that insufficient for commercial contractors, and chose prohibition. The scheme now promoted to domestic builders relies on exactly the protection that was judged insufficient. That is a contradiction in reasoning even where it is not a contradiction in law.

He also said industry had not been consulted:

"They haven't really consulted industry about this, from [being] completely honest."

Asked whether a voluntary scheme is weaker than a mandatory one, he agreed, then explained why the NFB still does not back licensing:

"But then you get into the point of unintended consequences of bringing in measures. So for example, Australia's got licensing for all the building industry, and they still have the black market delivering lots of works. People are protected there. It would shrink the size of the industry and smaller works aren't gonna be delivered."

He is right about Australia, and the detail is worse than he had time to say. Licensing there is compulsory, run state by state rather than nationally. It has not cleared out the unlicensed trade. The Australian Treasury's Black Economy Taskforce named building and construction as a high-risk sector. South Australia raised its penalties this year to $150,000 for an individual and $550,000 for a company, because unlicensed work "continues to be a recurring issue". And in a joint operation with the Australian Border Force, NSW Fair Trading spoke to 48 people on residential building sites and issued on-the-spot fines to nine of them for working unlicensed.

Nine out of forty-eight, in a jurisdiction where a licence is compulsory. That is the argument against licensing as a cure, made by the enforcement figures of a country that has one.

The Federation of Master Builders takes the opposite view and has done for years, through its Licence to Build campaign. Its chief executive Brian Berry:

"In the long term the government should be looking at a compulsory licensing scheme for building companies... Currently anyone can call themselves a builder with no minimum competence level required to run a building company. Voluntary schemes have never filled the gap for good regulation that protects both reputable builders and consumers... Without statutory licensing any voluntary scheme, however well intended, is likely to struggle to gain traction."

Two trade bodies, both arguing for small builders, opposite conclusions. Anyone who finds the answer obvious should notice that the organisations who do this full time do not agree.

The alternative nobody is reporting

The fair criticism of everything above is that it is easier to say what a scheme cannot do than to say what would work. So here is an alternative, and it is not ours.

"The much better approach is for every building to have a digital building passport... everyone that does the work on that building subsequently is recorded, so that we know who the good and bad people are."

The record attaches to the property rather than to the trader. Works are logged against the building, with the company and the people who did them. Sell a house with unrecorded work and the buyer's solicitor finds the gap, which is already what happens where building regulations have been bypassed. That gives the homeowner a reason to insist on it, and puts the cost of going off-record on the person choosing to go off-record.

Then the enforcement, which is the part a voluntary badge cannot do:

"If a company keeps getting a black mark against their name for work, we can investigate that builder and strike them off. They can't get insurance. They can't get accreditations. They can't use the app... So we can actually shine a light on as many bad builders as possible. This doesn't do that."

"It's actually tackling the issue at source... it creates a better focus on building control, and we need to understand that they are really important. They've a little bit been left out of the conversation in the last few decades, but they're vital."

Notice the structural difference. A voluntary payment app reaches only traders who opt in. A record attached to every building reaches every job on every property, including work done by people who would never join anything. A trader who wants to stay invisible cannot opt out of the house.

That is not an answer thought up on a phone-in. It is published NFB policy. The federation calls it a Digital Building Passport, describes it as a property logbook recording construction and renovation works alongside the companies and individuals who delivered them, and wants it publicly searchable. Its chief executive Richard Beresford puts the reasoning as creating "an accountability environment", where bad actors have fewer places to hide and homeowners get a tool for choosing.

Something like it already exists in UK law, and the limits of it are instructive. The Building Safety Act 2022 requires a golden thread of information: a single digital record of a building's design, construction and maintenance, handed to the accountable person on completion. It applies only to higher-risk buildings, and it is not publicly searchable. The machinery has been built. It has just never been pointed at Mrs Jones's extension.

It would need care. A record with consequences attached needs a proper route to challenge an entry, or it becomes a different kind of unfairness. But it is a serious proposal from the organisation representing the firms who would carry it, and it has had a fraction of the attention the app has had.

The two callers the scheme has to answer

The homeowner. A caller had lost a five-figure sum to a builder who walked off halfway. She went to Trading Standards. She discovered he had multiple county court judgments against his name, all unsatisfied, so suing was pointless, because he had already demonstrated he would not pay. The police would not treat it as a crime.

Nothing announced on 28 August would have changed that outcome by a penny, because that builder was never going to be on the app. A scheme you opt into cannot be joined by a business whose entire model depends on not being traceable. The trader who takes a deposit and never comes back does not sign up to a code of conduct, does not accept a retention held by an ombudsman, and very much does not want a payment trail through a regulated processor.

The builder. He does not advertise. His work comes by personal recommendation. Asked whether he would join, the presenter cut in, tongue firmly in cheek, and he took it as the wind-up it was:

"Well, because you're exactly the issue, aren't you? You've got personal recommendations. You don't advertise. You don't do any of that stuff."

It was a joke. It also happened to be true, which is why it is here. The builder the scheme most needs inside it is the one with the least reason to join. He is not short of work. His clients came from other clients. Nothing in his working week creates a gap that a badge would fill. That is not a marketing problem to be solved with better outreach. It is the design.

He said one more thing, prefacing it himself with "I know that sounds really harsh":

"Most builders, most good builders, will actually say that there are probably more bad customers than there are bad builders."

The presenter's answer was the interesting part. Not a challenge, not a defence of homeowners:

"Yeah, we've heard that."

A national consumer programme confirming it hears this from the trade routinely. Every measure in the announcement is aimed at the supply of bad building work. The demand side, the customer who selects on price alone, the customer who withholds the final payment because they can, is not addressed anywhere in it, and cannot be addressed by a badge.

He added, almost as an aside, that you can get a waste carrier's licence from the local council without much difficulty. That is a licence, in construction, obtainable without demonstrating competence at anything. Worth holding onto when anyone argues that licensing is the answer, because the trade already has licences, and that is what one of them is worth.

The comments under his own video

The Prime Minister marked the announcement with a video on Instagram. Brick wall, open collar, brown felt cowboy hat held up to camera, the words "the cowboys" across the screen. Caption: "It's time someone took this on."

At the time of writing it has drawn over 27,000 likes, more than 3,000 comments, 436 reposts and 5,000 shares.

The comments are worth reading, because they are largely from the people the scheme is aimed at. Working builders, replying under their own company names, in public, within hours.

@builderessy: "plenty of rogue customers out there let's have an app to protect the builders wages shall we? what's good for the goose ..."

@wardsbuilders: "What a load of absolute waffle! This will not help the industry, and the narrative it builds is that the industry is shady. Come on Andy, think up another one. Excited to see the protection he's got lined up to protect the builders from the naughty non payers."

@boucher.oliver laid out the context: record insolvencies in the construction sector since 2024, light years off house building targets, small construction firms already working to an almost impossible cashflow model, and now a decision to "place the state between customer and contractor payments".

@mahoneybrickworksltd, on 76 likes: "Yeah because you lot can be trusted can't you."

@red_design_and_build_ltd: "More like finding more ways to keep your beady eyes on our hard earned money."

@yours.for.the.making, more briefly: "Can you do the same with MPs?"

And the most-liked reply of the lot, on 211: "What about these political cowboys who go back on everything they promised once they're in power?"

Two things about that.

The first is that neither of the arguments this post makes, that the protection runs in one direction and that the word "cowboy" lands on everybody rather than on the minority it targets, is a position anyone needed talking into. Builders arrived at both of them unprompted, underneath the video announcing the policy, before a single clause had been read. If the government wants over 100,000 traders signed up by the end of this month, that is the audience it is starting from, and it did not arrive there by accident.

The second is the hat. A video about cowboys, filmed with a prop, captioned "it's time someone took this on", is a communications decision rather than a policy one. Hold that image in mind for the next section, because there is a difference between taking something on and announcing that you have.

One scheme, and no two descriptions the same

Step back from the individual clauses and look at what the past fortnight has actually produced.

The scheme's own website said retention is held by the Ombudsman in an independent trust account, until those words came off it. The minister responsible told Radio 4 that 10 per cent of her budget would be "held in escrow by the ombudsman and only released when I'm happy with the final result". Clause 6.2, which governs the arrangement, says the money is held by Trusted Payments in the Trusted Payments client protection account.

Asked twice, on air, how a builder gets accredited, by a presenter who went out of his way to say he was not trying to catch her out, the minister could not set out a route. No application process, no assessing body beyond a reference to trading standards, no criteria, no cost, no timescale.

The compensation limit is stated three different ways in the same document. Clause 9.4 caps liability at the greater of £20,000 or the price paid. Clause 8.7 refers to a £20,000 warranty maximum. Clause 8.1 makes the warranty subject to 9.4. A homeowner on a £28,000 job cannot tell from the contract what they are covered for, and neither can the builder.

The 10 per cent itself carries four names across five clauses, one of which treats a retention and a deposit as two different things. Press coverage called it a deposit paid to the builder at the start. The minister called it a retention withheld until the end. The contract says it is neither: the customer funds it on day one and Trusted Payments holds it. Three descriptions of one payment, and the difference between them is the whole of a small firm's working capital on that job.

The dispute route is 14 days on the page promoting it and 45 days in the contract binding it.

And the terms reached version 2.5 on 30 August, two days after the government announcement, having been on version 2.4 as recently as July. The company has since told us a further amendment is coming. So the document was being rewritten while the press release was still circulating, and it is being rewritten again now.

One thing should be said in the minister's defence here, because it matters. Her description was the scheme's own description. Until 3 September the homepage said retention was held by the Ombudsman in an independent trust account and that Trusted Payments had no access to and no control over the money. The trade guide sent to us this week says the completion payment is "held in escrow until handover". She was not inventing anything on air. She was repeating what the scheme said about itself, in the words it used. The problem is not that a minister misspoke on the radio. It is that the description she was given and the contract that governs the arrangement were not the same document, and nobody appears to have checked before any of it was said out loud.

Put together, that is not a scheme with a couple of drafting wrinkles. It is a government-endorsed product whose central mechanism, where your money sits, who holds it, what releases it and what you get if it goes wrong, cannot be described consistently by the department that announced it, the operator that runs it, or the contract that governs it.

To be fair about the possible explanations, this looks far more like haste than deception. The minister said herself that the government "wanted to act quickly", and that a mandatory scheme "would take a little bit more time". Speed was the stated priority, and this is what speed produces. Nobody sat down and decided to mislead anybody.

But the effect on a builder is the same either way. Homeowners are being encouraged to put money into this scheme on the strength of a description its own contract does not support, and traders are being encouraged to accept a retention on terms nobody involved has yet managed to state the same way twice. That is being announced as consumer protection.

If a builder handed a client a quote with three different prices on it, changed the terms two days after signing, and could not explain what had happened to the deposit, nobody would need a press release to work out what to call it.

Which is the honest answer to why the trade has folded its arms. Not that builders object to accountability. Most of them are already registered, insured, certificated and inspected, and would happily take a scheme that worked. It is that they have read the paperwork, and the paperwork does not agree with itself.

The product is not the problem

Go back to the list this article started with. Proof of funds before you lift a tool, milestones you set, variations handled in an app, a warranty, a dispute route with no solicitor in it. Nothing in everything since has made a single item on it untrue.

The state the paperwork is in is not a scandal either, taken on its own. A young company, moving quickly, marketing running ahead of the documents, terms going back and forth with lawyers, a fee structure that has not settled, an app that is not live yet. Every business that has ever shipped anything has looked like that at some point. And this one has been straight with us: it told us the terms were being amended before we asked, and its founder agreed to a call.

The problem is what was done to it.

On 28 August the government took a product in that condition, with no published accreditation route, terms two versions from settled and an app that was not live, and put the Prime Minister behind it in a video with a cowboy hat and a caption saying it was time someone took this on. It said over 100,000 traders would have access inside a month. It offered it to homeowners as the answer to £10.3 billion of harm.

Nobody asked this company to be ready for that. Somebody in government decided it was.

That is the actual failure, and it does not belong to Trusted Payments. A private business is entitled to iterate its terms in public and fix its own documents. A government endorsement is a different kind of object. It transfers trust from the state to the product, and the people receiving that transfer are homeowners who will read "government backed" and stop asking questions, and builders being told by customers that this is now how it is done.

Endorsement is the one thing you cannot iterate. It either arrives after the checks, or it arrives instead of them.

What we have asked the Department

Written questions have gone to the Department:

Who is the legal holder of retained funds, and whose money is it if any party in the chain becomes insolvent, because her description and clause 6.2 do not appear to say the same thing.

What period counts as a "reasonable time" for sign-off under clause 4.4, what obliges a customer to sign off at all, and how long escalation takes in practice.

The application route, assessing body, criteria, cost, decision time and appeal route for accreditation.

What a homeowner on a £28,000 contract can actually recover, given that clause 9.4, clause 8.7 and clause 8.1 do not yield one answer between them.

Whether the retention prohibition in the Commercial Payments Bill will apply to residential occupier contracts, given section 106.

Which construction trade bodies were consulted before 28 August 2026, and on what dates.

And whether the terms will be redrafted to match the way the scheme is being described publicly.

Those questions are for the Department, and they were put to its press office in writing on 1 September. Separate questions about the terms, the fees and the dispute process have gone to Trusted Payments, which has answered in part and is speaking to us again on Friday. Both have been offered a right of reply. Anything either sends will be published in full and unedited, and if either sends nothing, that will be recorded too.

Where this leaves you

If customers are asking whether you are signed up, you are being asked to answer from a position where the minister responsible could not describe the accreditation route when asked twice on national radio, and where the scheme's own contract does not match how the scheme has been described publicly.

Do not sign up in a panic. The Approved Code is not fully live until December. Read the current terms rather than the coverage. They reached version 2.5 on 30 August, two days after the announcement, having been on version 2.4 in July, so check the version before you rely on anything.

Before you join any scheme that holds your money, get four answers in writing: what exact event releases the retention, who decides it has happened, what happens if the customer simply does not respond, and how long escalation takes from the day you start it.

And price the retention. Ten per cent held to a sign-off you do not control is, for a lot of small firms, the entire net margin on the job sitting in someone else's account until a lay client presses a button. That is a cashflow decision, not an admin detail.

Give the scheme its due on one point, because it is real and it is the best argument for the whole thing. If the customer has funded the stage, the money exists. Not "they seem fine". Not "it's a nice house so they must be good for it". The funds are in, with a third party, before you put a sheet of ply on the van. Proof of funds before you start is something domestic builders have never had and have wanted for years.

So the honest way to weigh it is as a trade. You give up control of when the last slice reaches you, and you accept a held sum you cannot put into the next job. You get proof the money existed before you started, an agreed scope and milestone schedule as standard, and a dispute process that at least exists. For a builder taking on a client they do not know off an internet lead, that may well be a good trade. For a builder with twenty years of repeat customers who pay on the day the job finishes, it is plainly worse than what they already have.

We would rather be wrong about this. If the retention releases cleanly and quickly, and the accreditation route turns out to be straightforward and cheap, it will have done some good. Watch how the sign-off works in practice over the first six months, and price accordingly until you know.

When, not if, and what the government finds time for

Listen to that interview again and it starts to sound like a when rather than an if. The scheme is voluntary at this stage. Mandatory "would take a little bit more time". The government "won't hesitate to act further". It is watching uptake to decide.

Follow the logic to its end. If the trade takes up a scheme it had little or no hand in designing, those become the terms. If it does not, insufficient uptake is the evidence that voluntary was not enough, and something firmer follows. Either way the destination is the same, and the only question was whether you walked or were carried.

There is a version of that argument which says: if you do not like it and will not sign up, you are the problem. Which brings us to what this government has found time for, and what it has not.

The Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act received Royal Assent on 20 July 2023 and came into force on 20 January 2024. It has done nothing since, because it cannot: the Act is a power to make regulations, and in the two and a half years the Home Secretary has held that power, not one regulation has been laid.

When the scope was finally confirmed in October 2025, the government wrote this:

"the economic impact assessment findings indicate that the total cost to business would be disproportionate to the benefits of implementing this proposal. For all the above reasons, we will not include tools in the secondary legislation."

Not tools. And in the same document, explaining why marking them would not help anyway: it "would not solve the issue of tradespeople's vans being broken into and wiped out".

They are right about that, and it is a strange thing to put in writing as a reason for doing nothing.

The minister's foreword to that document said: "I inherited this Act from my predecessor, and I am committed to its implementation and bringing forward the secondary legislation to enact." That was October 2025. It is now September 2026.

We put that timeline to Frankie Williams, who runs Stolen Tools UK and has campaigned on this for years. Stolen Tools UK is a partner of this site, which is worth saying, and he is also the person in the country who has spent the most time on it.

"It's not that we don't know tool theft is a problem. It's that getting something done about it isn't moving anywhere near fast enough. For a tradesperson, three years isn't just a delay on a policy document. It's three years of more vans being broken into, more tools being stolen, more jobs disrupted, more money lost and more people having to replace the equipment they need to earn a living. We don't need another announcement. We need action that actually protects tradespeople and their tools!!"

Read that last line again with the rest of this article in mind. We don't need another announcement.

Steve Baker runs SB Multitrade, and has written for this site before. Some years ago he parked a hire van outside a hotel, backed up against a wall, under CCTV. He did what any of us would call being careful. Thieves popped the lock in around twenty-two seconds and cleared twelve to fifteen thousand pounds of tools into a waiting car in under five minutes. Because it was a hire van, his insurance did not pay. Police later recovered tools they believed were his and could not give them back, because the serial numbers had been ground off and nobody could prove whose they were. Thirteen years of graft, gone in a night, with some of it sitting in a police store he could not claim from.

Forensic marking is the thing that answers precisely that problem. It is the thing the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act was written to require. The Act has been in force since January 2024, no regulations have ever been laid under it, and hand-held power tools were taken out of scope because marking them would cost business too much.

He has taken that case as far as Parliament, at a reception on tool theft attended by a room full of people from the industry. The trade did not sit on its hands. It organised, it turned up in the building where the law gets made, and it made the argument in person.

Asked this week what he makes of the new scheme:

"There's no interest in protecting the trade, only in taking from it, be that in taxes or price increases. But when it comes to help, they have no interest in helping. They only want to line their own pockets."

That last sentence is his and not ours, and we are not going to dress it up or trim it into something more polite. It is what a man says when thirteen years of tools go in one night, the police find some of them and cannot hand them over, and the law written to fix exactly that has sat unused for two and a half years while a payment app went from press release to launch in seven days.

His full account is in our guide on why tool theft matters now.

Set the two timelines side by side. An Act of Parliament about stolen equipment: Royal Assent 2023, in force 2024, no regulations laid, and hand-held power tools written out of its scope on the ground that protecting them would cost business too much. A voluntary consumer payment app: press release to live in a week, 100,000 traders targeted by the end of the month.

Nobody is arguing that consumers should be left to the mercy of bad builders. The £10.3 billion is real and so are the people behind it. But if you want to know why the trade greets a government scheme with folded arms rather than gratitude, it is not because builders object to being accountable. It is because accountability arrives inside a week, and protection has been waiting since 2024.

Ask a builder to volunteer for a retention on his own money, and he will reasonably ask what he has had in return.

This post is comment on public policy and general information, not legal advice. The schemes described are new and their terms are still changing. Check the current terms before signing up to anything.

The full background: The cowboy builder crackdown cannot reach a cowboy. It can reach you.

Sources

The programme. You and Yours, "Call You & Yours: What's your experience of getting building work done?", BBC Radio 4, broadcast 12:04, Tuesday 8 September 2026, available on BBC Sounds. Kate Dearden MP, pre-recorded interview: accreditation question at 18:14 and 18:40, her answer at 18:55; "voluntary at this stage" at 19:26 and 19:36; retention and escrow at 21:12 and 21:19; "won't hesitate to act further" at 22:17. Contributions from Rico Wojtulewicz, Director of Policy, National Federation of Builders, and from callers, in the same programme. Every quote in this post can be checked against the recording.

The Prime Minister's video and the comments beneath it. Video posted by the Prime Minister on Instagram, 28 August 2026, and the public replies to it. Captured 8 September 2026. Engagement figures are as at that date and will have moved since.

Steve Baker, SB Multitrade. Interview by telephone, 8 September 2026. His account of the theft of his tools appears in our guide on why tool theft matters now. He has contributed to this site before.

Frankie Williams, Stolen Tools UK. Statement to SiteKiln, 8 September 2026, quoted in full and unedited. Stolen Tools UK is a partner of this site and that is disclosed in the text.

Trusted Payments' own material. Advance copies of the trade guide, the homeowner guide, the "Working for Trades" FAQ and the "Joining Trusted Payments" onboarding form, supplied to us by the company on the record on 8 September 2026 and not yet published. Copies held and hashed.

Trade body positions. Federation of Master Builders, Brian Berry, Chief Executive, statement of 28 August 2026, and the FMB's Licence to Build campaign. National Federation of Builders, Richard Beresford, Chief Executive, statement of 28 August 2026, and the NFB's published Digital Building Passport proposal. Building Safety Act 2022, section 88, and the golden thread regulations.

Australian licensing. Australian Treasury Black Economy Taskforce Final Report; South Australia penalty increases, 2026; NSW Fair Trading and Australian Border Force joint compliance operation.

The scheme terms. trustedpayments.uk and its published terms and conditions, version 2.5 of 30 August 2026, clauses 3.4, 3.5, 4.4, 6.2, 8.1, 8.7, 9.4 and 14.2. Both pages captured 1, 3 and 8 September 2026 and hashed. The 1 September versions are in the Wayback Machine.

The announcement and the figures. GOV.UK, "Government steps in to protect families from cowboy builders and aggressive bailiffs", 28 August 2026. Consumer detriment figure from the Consumer Detriment Survey 2024, published 27 March 2025, Table 5, page 42.

The licensing bill. Domestic Building Works (Consumer Protection) Bill, first reading 22 June 2026, second reading listed 5 February 2027.

The retention prohibition and the consultation options. GOV.UK Commercial Payments Bill overview factsheet; Commercial Payments Bill [HL]; Late Payment Consultation and government response.

Section 106. Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, legislation.gov.uk.

Insulation under government schemes, and TrustMark. National Audit Office, "Energy efficiency installations under the Energy Company Obligation", HC 1334, 14 October 2025. Public Accounts Committee, "Faulty energy efficiency installations", HC 1229, 23 January 2026. Written Ministerial Statement, "Solid wall insulation under ECO4 and GBIS", 17 July 2025. GOV.UK, "Action taken to protect households with poor-quality insulation". Ofgem ECO complaints guidance. BBC News on lenders and spray foam insulation. TrustMark's Trusted Payments page for homeowners, captured 8 September 2026 and hashed.

Tool theft legislation. Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023, section 5(2); GOV.UK, "Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act: summary of call for evidence responses and conclusion", 17 October 2025, including the ministerial foreword; and the accompanying GOV.UK economic note.