The cowboy builder crackdown cannot reach a cowboy. It can reach you

On 28 August 2026 the government announced what every headline since has called a crackdown on cowboy builders. If you run a small building firm you have probably had a customer mention it already, usually as a question with an edge to it.

So here is the first thing worth knowing, because most of the coverage has blurred it.

There is no cowboy builder bill. Nothing announced that day makes anything compulsory for builders. Not a licence, not a register, not a qualification. The only compulsory measure in the whole announcement was about bailiffs.

What was actually announced

The government said the app would go live within a week of the announcement, with access for over 100,000 traders by the end of September. The Approved Code launches in autumn 2026 and is meant to be fully live by December.

The problem it is aimed at is real, and the government's own figures are not the part to argue with. More than one in four UK adults had a problem with home improvement work in the past 18 months. Of those, 37% faced extra costs, averaging £750. GOV.UK puts the 2024 total lost to unfair practices in home and garden maintenance at £10.3 billion.

Nobody in the trade is going to defend that. The question is not whether the problem exists. It is who ends up carrying the fix.

The word nobody used in the coverage

Trusted Payments describes its own mechanism on its own website, and the sentence is this:

"Retention is held by the Ombudsman in an independent trust account."

Retention.

If you work the commercial side you just winced. If you have only ever worked domestic, this is the moment to read what retention actually is and how long they can hold it, because it is arriving in kitchens and loft conversions.

The shape is straightforward enough. A deposit of 10% at the start, milestone payments released as the job proceeds, and money held back until the customer marks the work complete in the app.

Those mechanics are set out in the scheme's own terms and conditions, which reached version 2.5 on 30 August 2026, two days after the government announcement, having been on version 2.4 as recently as 10 July. Read the current version before you commit to anything. It is moving.

Now the part that should genuinely annoy you

While that is being introduced into domestic work, Parliament is busy banning it in commercial work.

The Commercial Payments Bill [HL] was introduced in the House of Lords on 19 May 2026, had its second reading on 9 June, cleared committee stage on 21 July with 30 government amendments agreed, and has its report stage listed for 15 September 2026. The government's own factsheet says the Bill includes "prohibiting the deduction and withholding of retention payments under the terms of a construction contract", adding that it "will consult further on the timing for implementation".

Read those two things next to each other:

• Commercial construction: twenty years of campaigning, a consultation, and a Bill in Parliament to stop money being held back from builders.
• Domestic construction: a government-backed scheme, announced three months later, that holds money back from builders.

And this is not a coincidence of timing. The government consulted on two ways of dealing with retentions, and the choice it made is the whole point:

• Option A: prohibit retention clauses outright.
• Option B: allow retentions to continue, but require the money withheld to be protected, either by segregation in a separate bank account or through an instrument of guarantee.

The government chose Option A. Holding the money safely in a separate account was on the table, was consulted on, and was not judged good enough for commercial construction.

Now read the Trusted Payments sentence again. "Retention is held by the Ombudsman in an independent trust account."

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 your 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.

Being precise about the status, because it matters: the government has said it will consult further before implementation, so this is a stated policy choice rather than a settled one. But it is a stated choice, made after consulting the industry, and it went the other way.

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

"This Part does not apply to a construction contract with a residential occupier"

A residential occupier contract is one "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, then, the retention ban does not reach domestic work at all. The domestic builder never had the Construction Act's payment protections, is not obviously getting the retention ban, and is 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 this could change. What nobody should do is assume the ban will cover domestic work. Nothing published so far says it will.

What happens if the customer just does nothing

This is the question that decides whether any of this matters, and Trusted Payments answer it themselves in their own terms and conditions.

There is no automatic release. Clause 4.4 defines when a job counts as finished, and it ends like this:

"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')... If the consumer does not sign off in a reasonable time then the Contractor shall contact Trusted Payments and request escalation to the Ombudsman."

Read the first half carefully. Completion happens when the work is done and the customer marks it complete in the app. Both. Finishing the job is not, on its own, completing it.

Then the second half hands the next move to you, 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.

So what does escalating involve? Clause 14.1 covers "any disagreement, dispute or issue arising from this Contract". Clause 14.4 confirms your route is in there: "If the Contractor has an issue with payment at the end of the project, they may also raise a claim for the Related Services." And clause 14.2 sets the clock on all of it:

"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 even be asked to look. Then under clause 14.5 either party asks Trusted Payments to refer it, and the ombudsman runs its own process on its own timetable after that.

To be fair to the scheme, it is not a closed shop at the end. Clause 14.7 says the ombudsman's decision is "final and binding", but that "either party may challenge it through adjudication or legal proceedings within 28 days". Which is a real route out, and is also a route straight back into the courts, which is where we came in.

The shape is not in doubt. Nothing releases your money automatically, no time limit binds the customer, and the escalation is yours to start, yours to run and yours to wait out.

Now compare the two sides of that. The customer's cost of not pressing the button is nothing. No fee, no form, no deadline, no consequence. Your cost of getting your own money released is a written process, an ombudsman referral, and however long that takes, on money you have already earned and already done the work for.

If that shape feels familiar, it is because it is roughly how a chargeback works on a card payment. With one difference that is not in your favour. A chargeback takes back money you have already been paid, and at least you had the use of it. This withholds money you were never paid in the first place, so it cannot buy the materials for the next job while you wait for someone to press a button.

To be fair about it: on most jobs the customer signs off and none of this ever comes up. But you do not judge a payment mechanism by the job that goes right. You judge it by what it does on the job that goes slightly wrong, because that is the one you were already going to lose money on.

The one thing it genuinely does fix

Give it its due, because this part is real and it is the best argument for the whole scheme.

If the customer has funded the stage, the money exists. Not "they seem fine". Not "it is 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.

Anyone who has carried four grand of materials and three weeks of labour onto a job for someone who turned out to be juggling it across three credit cards knows exactly what that is worth. Proof of funds before you start is something domestic builders have never had and have wanted for years.

So the honest way to weigh this is as a trade rather than a stitch-up:

For a builder taking on a client they do not know, off a lead from the internet, 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.

Which is the real answer to "should I sign up". It depends almost entirely on the quality of your client list, and nobody but you can score that.

Protection is running in one direction

Now the thing to notice about the whole package.

The insurance cover protects the homeowner. The retention protects the homeowner. The code of conduct binds the trader. The dispute process is built around a homeowner raising a problem. Every one of those is defensible on its own terms, and consumers did need better protection than they had.

But there is no equivalent running the other way. Nothing in it obliges a customer to sign off within a fixed period. Nothing penalises a customer who sits on a finished job. There is no cover for the builder who has put four weeks of labour and £8,000 of materials into a house and then cannot get the last payment released.

And this is structural rather than an oversight. The Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman and the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman are independent, not-for-profit bodies approved by government under the Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Disputes Regulations 2015. The name of the regulations is the point. The machinery was constituted to resolve consumer disputes, and a trader route has been layered on top of it.

One point of accuracy that matters if you ever end up using it. If the money does not come out, you are not arguing with the government. Trusted Payments is a private company, and the ombudsman is a private not-for-profit that government approves rather than operates. There is no statutory appeal sitting behind it. The government's contribution was the announcement.

That is worth knowing precisely, because it cuts the other way from how it sounds. The government backing is what will persuade a homeowner to ask you to use it. The process you would actually be standing in is a commercial one.

"Voluntary" is doing a lot of work in that sentence

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.

Then there is the arithmetic of any fixed cost in this trade. A sole trader and a national firm fill in the same form and pay broadly the same sort of fee. One spreads it across thirty jobs a year. The other spreads it across three thousand. Every compliance layer added to domestic building is paid, proportionally, by the smallest firm on the street.

It cannot reach the people it is named after

This is the bit that no amount of scheme design fixes.

A scheme you opt into cannot be joined by a business whose entire model depends on not being traceable. The trader who takes a £4,000 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 an FCA-authorised processor.

The Federation of Master Builders said as much on the day. Chief executive Brian Berry welcomed the direction but warned that "this is just another voluntary programme without regulation behind it", and that "voluntary schemes have never filled the gap for good regulation that protects both reputable builders and consumers". The FMB wants compulsory licensing of building companies, and points out that "anyone can call themselves a builder with no minimum competence level required to run a building company".

He is right about the hole. Whether licensing is the way to fill it is where the trade splits.

The half of the problem nobody legislates

Everything in the announcement is aimed at the supply of bad builders. Nothing in it goes anywhere near the demand.

Ask anyone in the trade what actually happens. Three quotes go in. One of them is 20 to 25% below the other two. And instead of the obvious question, which is why is that one so much cheaper than everybody else, the customer decides they have found a deal.

That transaction is where a lot of the £10.3 billion comes from. Not really a con. A choice, made on price alone, by somebody with no way of pricing the difference between the three.

Which brings in the ten year problem, and every trade in the country hears this one weekly. Customers price a job against what building work cost the last time they had any done, and for most people that was a long time ago.

Here is the number that settles it on the doorstep. The National Living Wage was introduced on 1 April 2016 at £7.20 an hour. From 1 April 2026 the headline adult rate is £12.71. That is a 76% rise in the legal minimum you are allowed to pay somebody, in ten years, before you get anywhere near materials, insurance, fuel, or the van. The age band widened from 25 and over to 21 and over across that period so it is not perfectly like for like, but the direction and the scale are not in any doubt.

Nobody quoting your extension in 2026 is working off 2016 money. The one who appears to be is either coming back for more later or is not paying somebody properly now.

And this is what makes the crackdown circular. A voluntary badge only changes anything if customers value the badge above the price. The government's own figures tell you what customers actually do: more than one in four had a problem, 37% of those paid extra, £10.3 billion went out of the door. Those are the numbers of a market selecting on price and finding out afterwards.

Drop a badge into that market and the customer who was always going to take the cheapest quote still takes the cheapest quote. The builder who joined the scheme just has a slightly harder conversation about why he costs more. There will always be somebody willing to fill the space underneath, and that person is, by definition, not in the scheme.

So the good firms end up carrying a badge, a fee and a retention, the gap underneath them stays exactly where it was, and something moves in to fill it. That is not a crackdown. That is a handicap system.

And there is one more cost that never appears in any impact assessment. Every announcement like this ships with the same word welded to it. Cowboy. It is aimed at a minority and it lands on everybody, because the homeowner reading the coverage does not come away thinking there is a small group of bad operators who need catching. They come away thinking they need protecting from builders.

No small firm gets to opt out of that. The overwhelming majority of people in this trade turn up, do the work properly, put right what they get wrong, and are owed money by somebody right now. They are not out to rob anybody, and they should not have to keep proving it every time a press release goes out.

The two trade bodies disagree, and that argument matters more than the announcement

The National Federation of Builders went the other way on the same day:

"We hope this is not licensing by the back door, an idea which would expand the black market and its bad actors, particularly on smaller works, add costs and paperwork to customers and industry, jam the door for new entrants and risk nudging many vital older workers into retirement."

Two trade bodies. Both arguing for small builders. Opposite conclusions. That is worth understanding properly, because whichever way it goes, it lands on the same people.

Where we come down, and this is opinion rather than law: the NFB has the better read of who absorbs the cost. Make it harder and more expensive to enter the trade legitimately and you do not remove the cowboys, you improve their competitive position. The cash-in-hand route gets relatively more attractive every time the legitimate route gets another fee attached to it. The people who cannot afford the paperwork are not the rogues. The rogues were never doing the paperwork.

None of this lands on an empty desk

A retention would be one thing on its own. It is not on its own. Look at what has already arrived on a small UK construction business in 2026 alone.

MTD's threshold drops to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028, so if it has not caught you yet it is on its way. What Making Tax Digital actually requires of a builder.

The VAT threshold gets the least attention and does some of the most damage, because a frozen threshold is a tax rise that nobody has to vote for. £90,000 of turnover is not a big firm in construction. It is one builder, a van, a labourer and a decent year. Cross it and you either add 20% to every domestic quote or you absorb it, while the bloke pricing against you who stays just underneath does neither. When you have to register for VAT and what it does to domestic pricing.

One detail worth noticing if you take on young lads: the 16 to 17 year old rate and the apprentice rate are now the same figure, £8.00. At that age the wage gap that used to make an apprentice the cheaper option has closed entirely. Apprenticeship rights and pay.

Here is why that belongs in a post about cowboy builders rather than in a separate moan.

Every single item on that list is enforceable only against a business that is already visible.

• Making Tax Digital applies to you because you declare your income.
• The VAT threshold catches you because you registered.
• The wage floors bind you because you run PAYE.
• The Approved Code reaches you because you opted in.

The man taking cash for a driveway does none of those four things, and the crackdown announced in August will not reach him either. Every measure aimed at the bad end of this trade turns into another cost at the good end, because the good end is the only end that is reachable.

That is not an argument against any one of them. MTD may well be the right direction of travel. The wage floors are somebody's actual wage and that somebody has rent to pay. A frozen threshold is a Treasury decision with its own logic behind it. It is an argument about the total, and about the fact that nobody, anywhere, adds the total up before adding to it.

Go back and read the NFB line from August again, the one about jamming the door for new entrants and nudging older workers into retirement. That is what it is describing. If it feels harder to justify taking on an apprentice or employing your first person than it did three years ago, that is not nostalgia. The numbers genuinely moved. What taking on your first employee actually costs.

What we think happens next, and this bit is a forecast

Everything above this line is documented. This next part is not. It is us reading the incentives, and we could be wrong. Treat it accordingly.

The scheme attaches to the contract between the homeowner and the trader, so your exposure to it scales with your contract value. Anyone holding a large domestic contract therefore has two obvious ways to shrink that exposure, and both of them already have momentum behind them.

One: cost plus instead of fixed price. A fixed price with a retention on the end and a sign-off you do not control is a worse deal than open book with staged payments and nothing much held at the finish. Expect more builders to quote the second way.

Two: the client contracts the trades directly and you charge a fee to run the job. This is the one worth thinking hard about, because the tax arithmetic underneath it is not a forecast at all.

A main contractor holding a £120,000 extension turns over £120,000 on that job. The same person charging £18,000 to manage it, with the client contracting the trades themselves, turns over £18,000. One of those figures is £30,000 over the VAT registration threshold. The other is £72,000 under it.

And a domestic client cannot reclaim VAT. So on the labour element that is a straight 20% difference in what the job costs the customer, for the same work, by the same people. That incentive existed long before August. What August added was a second reason pointing in exactly the same direction.

Would HMRC stop it? Worth being precise rather than reassuring. HMRC can act against the artificial separation of a business under Schedule 1 of the VAT Act 1994, issuing a direction that treats the separated parts as a single taxable person, judged on the financial, economic and organisational links between them. But that rule is built for one business split into pieces. It is not obviously aimed at a genuine change in who contracts with whom, where the trades really are separate businesses working for the client. Which is precisely why the restructure is attractive rather than reckless.

If that is where this lands, the end state is more small under-threshold businesses, fewer main contractors carrying a whole job, and:

• Nobody holding single point responsibility for the finished building. That is the thing a homeowner needs most and knows to ask for least.
• The client coordinating the trades, which most clients cannot do and should not have to.
• More of the value of domestic construction sitting below the VAT threshold, which is a Treasury problem rather than a builder's problem, but it is a problem.

Which would be quite an outcome for a package designed to protect consumers from bad building work: removing from the job the one person who was answerable for all of it.

One warning if you are tempted by the fee model. If you become a consultant on paper while still directing the trades, still handling the money and still standing behind the finished job, you have changed the paperwork and not the substance. You keep every liability you had and give up the contract that proves what you were owed. If you restructure, restructure properly and write down exactly what you are and are not responsible for.

What to actually do about it

1. Do not sign up to anything in a panic. The Approved Code is not fully live until December 2026. You have time to read the terms rather than the press release.

2. 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. How long the escalation takes from the day you start it. For Trusted Payments the first three are answered above and the fourth is the one to chase them on, in writing, before you take a job through it. These are the same four questions you should ask about any retention clause anywhere, and they are what decide whether a retention is security or a hostage.

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

4. Get the written contract right first. It does more for you than any badge will, and it is free. What to put in writing on a domestic job.

5. Check what you already hold. TrustMark, a competent person scheme, trade body membership. A lot of firms can already answer the doorstep question and have not thought to say so. TrustMark registration, and whether it is worth it.

6. Keep your deposits sane and documented. Most of the horror stories that drove this announcement start with a deposit that was too big and unexplained. How much deposit to take and what protects you.

7. Know your existing route if a final payment goes wrong. None of it has been repealed. When a customer will not pay the final invoice.

Everyone in this trade knows one

Ask around any yard and you will find someone who has been done by a customer. Not a slow payer. Done. Work finished, money withheld, reasons invented somewhere around the last week of the job. A few of them did not survive it, because a small firm that has carried four weeks of wages and a materials bill and then does not get paid does not have a second month of that in it.

And most of them got the same advice, in the same words. The solicitor looks at it and says it will cost more in fees than the money is worth.

That is not the solicitor being unhelpful. That is the structure. A claim of £10,000 or less is normally allocated to the small claims track, and on that track the winner generally cannot recover their solicitor's fees. You can be entirely in the right, win, and still be out of pocket for having proved it. Which makes the £6,000 final payment nobody will release a debt with no sensible route to recovery, and the sort of customer who withholds it tends to understand that better than the builder does. Chasing a debt as a sole trader, and what it actually costs.

So does the new scheme make that better or worse? Honestly, both, and it depends entirely on which customer you have. Where the customer is decent but skint, it is better, because the money was proven and ring-fenced before you started. Where the customer is the problem, it adds a step, because the money is now somewhere you cannot reach without running a process to get it.

The regulator nobody is proposing

Here is what has been missing from every announcement like this for twenty years.

A customer can check you. Reviews, Companies House, your TrustMark registration, your trade body, and from this autumn whether you are on the Approved Code. Five ways to find out what sort of trader they are dealing with, and the government has just added the fifth.

You can check almost nothing about them. Not whether they have done this before. Not whether they fell out with the last four trades who worked on that house. Not whether there is a pattern that everyone locally already knows about.

Every trade knows the type. Fifteen tradespeople, and every single time it was somebody else's fault. That person is invisible to the next builder who prices their job, and they stay invisible, because nothing exists that would make them otherwise.

To be clear about what we are not asking for. Not a public list of named customers. It would catch honest people, because a customer who complained about genuinely bad work would end up on the same list as the serial withholder, and the legal exposure for whoever ran it would be substantial.

But do not skip past why it would be substantial, because it is the sharpest illustration in this entire post of the thing we are complaining about.

A customer can post a review saying your work was rubbish. If you want to challenge it, your company runs into section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013. Subsection (1) says a statement is not defamatory "unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant". Then subsection (2) adds a second hurdle that applies to businesses and to nobody else:

"For the purposes of this section, harm to the reputation of a body that trades for profit is not 'serious harm' unless it has caused or is likely to cause the body serious financial loss."

Read those two together. An individual has to show serious harm to their reputation. A business has to show serious harm and prove it in pounds. The higher bar is written into the Act, and it applies to you and not to them.

Now go the other way. Publish a post naming the customer who would not pay you and you are processing personal data about an identifiable living person, which puts you squarely inside UK GDPR. If you trade through a limited company they are not, because a company is not a living person. And their claim against you needs only serious harm to reputation, with no financial loss to prove.

Then add the cost of each route. A defamation claim is not a small claims matter. So the builder who was told his £6,000 debt was not worth chasing through the county court is, on the other side of the same ledger, exposed to a claim he would have to defend in a forum where the costs are an order of magnitude bigger.

Three separate mechanisms, all leaning the same way.

And here is the honest part, because the law is not built like that by accident. The serious financial loss bar exists for a good reason. It stops well-funded companies using libel threats to silence customers who have every right to complain, and if you removed it the first people harmed would be the customers of exactly the builders this announcement is aimed at. That protection should exist and we would defend it.

The problem is not that consumer speech is protected. The problem is that criticism and non-payment have been treated as the same thing. One is an opinion about the work, and it should be free. The other is a debt, and it is not speech at all. The apparatus built for the first was never designed to deal with the second, and nothing has ever been built for the second.

So no, not a register. But there is a serious version of the question underneath it. Lenders reference borrowers. Landlords reference tenants. Insurers price on claims history. A builder about to put £20,000 of his own money and six weeks of his own labour into a stranger's house references nothing at all, and has been told for thirty years that this is normal.

That is the gap. Consumer protection in this trade gets attention, a press release and an ombudsman. The protection running the other way gets nothing, and the people who need it are running businesses that employ people, train apprentices and pay tax.

Where we land

None of this is malicious, and the problem it is aimed at is real. £10.3 billion and one household in four is not a rounding error, and anyone who has followed a cowboy onto a job and priced the repair knows exactly how bad it gets. Consumers did need better than they had.

But look at what the crackdown requires of a business before it can do anything at all. A firm that wants to be found, wants a payment trail, will accept money being held back, and will opt in voluntarily.

That is a precise description of the honest small builder. It is a precise description of nobody else.

If the outcome is that good builders carry a badge, a fee and a retention while the bad ones carry on exactly as they were, the distance between the two gets wider rather than narrower. And the homeowner who was always going to be taken for £15,000 still gets taken for £15,000, because they were never on the app in the first place.

We would genuinely rather be wrong. If the Approved Code becomes the thing customers ask for, and the retention releases cleanly and quickly, it will have done some good, and knowing the money exists before you start is worth having whatever else turns out to be true. Watch how the sign-off works in practice over the first six months and price accordingly until you know.

But asked the two questions that matter, the answers are not close. Do small businesses in this industry need substantially better protection than they have? Obviously yes. Is this it? On the evidence so far, it is close to the polar opposite.

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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.

Sources. The announcement and the figures: GOV.UK, "Government steps in to protect families from cowboy builders and aggressive bailiffs", 28 August 2026. The retention wording, the sign-off escalation and the 45 day negotiation clause: trustedpayments.uk and its published terms and conditions, read on 1 September 2026. The retention ban: GOV.UK Commercial Payments Bill overview factsheet, and the Commercial Payments Bill [HL], first reading 19 May 2026. The two consultation options and the choice between them: the Late Payment Consultation of 31 July to 23 October 2025 and the government response of 24 March 2026. Section 106: Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, legislation.gov.uk. Trade body statements: Federation of Master Builders and National Federation of Builders, both 28 August 2026. The ombudsman's status: fhio.org and disputeresolutionombudsman.org, both approved under the Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Disputes (Competent Authorities and Information) Regulations 2015. The wage rates: The National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2026, in force 1 April 2026. Making Tax Digital thresholds and the VAT registration threshold: HMRC and GOV.UK guidance, checked 1 September 2026. Small claims allocation and costs recovery: the Civil Procedure Rules, Part 27.