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TrustMark registers and vets UK building companies and tradesmen

Regular DIY Doctor visitors know we support good building practices by promoting the use of our building contract and quality vetted tradesmen like TrustMark builders

One of the ways we help consumers find reliable building professionals is to recommend you use a registered insured tradesman when you need a builder. Our find a tradesman section features Trustmark registered builders to help you do this. We say this because they are approved and vetted by TrustMark, the only Government endorsed quality mark for the building industry.

Last month TrustMark reached out to more than 3.4 million consumers in BBC radio broadcasts across the country. The idea was to promote their service and to help anyone looking for a builder to find local, reliable, trades people.

Liz Male, Chairman of TrustMark, said: “The radio interviews have been a great way for us to communicate with consumers up and down the country and to raise awareness of TrustMark and our tradesmen. We need to put a stop to the rogue traders who continue to take advantage of unsuspecting and vulnerable people” The radio programs were broadcast on Local BBC stations, all the way from Scotland down to Northumberland, across from Wales to Kent and back to Cornwall.

Find a building firm you trust

If you are planning on employing a builder or building company, you want to be confident that you are using someone you can trust. Trustmark vet and register UK building firms, smaller general builders and if you need a more specialist tradesman, they have those too, such as a plumber, electrician, plasterer, decorator or landscape gardener.

DIY Doctor has been promoting the idea of a reliable system to help consumers find the builder they need for their building job for the last 5 years. This is why we introduced our ‘Desired Outcome’ Building Contract, which you can download from the site, along with guidance notes to help you plan your build step by step (with you builder) so everyone knows where they stand at every step of the process.

Why you should use a building contract

Reliable builders are usually happy to work with a contract, where Cowboy Builders are likely to run a mile if you ask them to discuss and commit to their plans and costs at the beginning of the negotiations.

Mike Edwards, Brand Manager for DIY Doctor comments “The DIY Doctor Desired Outcome Contract has been developed by a team of builders and legal experts in consultation with our customer focus group, to be sure that it protects the interests of both parties in a fair and equitable way.”

See Mike explaining about the Contract and other ways to ensure you get a trusted tradesman for your build in the video below – there are also other explanatory videos and an interview between a builder and customer after using the Desired Outcome building contract on the DIY Doctor YouTube Channel.

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TrustMark have just announced a 20% increase in online viewings of their listed tradesmen in the last 12 months.

DIY Doctor recommend using TrustMark to find tradespeople as part of our ‘Home Improvers Protection Solution’ (HIPS) campaign, because they are a government endorsed organisation and the only ‘find a tradesman’ scheme that insist on their tradespeople having membership to a trade body.

Your builder being a member of a trade body is not a safeguard in itself but it does mean that tradesmen must be insured, and the trade body will have a complaints procedure, and even an ombudsman, if things do go wrong.

Find a Good Builder

Builders who pay to belong to a trade body are more likely to be genuine professional builders rather than fly-by-night organisations that come and go – sometimes with your money in their pocket!

The mentality of a professional builder is one of long term business building, including doing a good job, being professional and open, being accountable, being insured, and desiring repeat business and recommendations. This is the sort of person you want to be working on your home.

Cowboy builders lie

Be aware that unscrupulous builders, who make a living out of ripping people off, may use a trade body to give their business a veneer of respectability, so do not accept their membership as proof they are genuine.

This is obviously annoying as it makes Cowboy Builders harder to spot, but just because they use a trade body logo on their paperwork or van doesn’t guarantee that they are actually members. They may have been members once, and let it lapse, or they may simply have lifted the logo illicitly.

Check out your builders before you employ them

When you are ‘interviewing’ builders, and other tradespeople, ask for their trade body membership number and check with the organisation involved. Trade bodies want to protect their good name and that of their legitimate members keep. They do not want to see cowboys stealing their good name. They may even want to take the matter further if you find your prospective builders are not members, but claiming they are.

If your builder does not readily give you their membership details, get in touch with the trade body anyway – they will be able to check their records against the builders name and address. If this builder is not registered don’t use them. If they are lying at this stage it does not bode well for future relations!

How can I avoid Cowboy Builders

If you are thinking of having work done at home, use all the tools on our website to help you employ a good tradesman and avoid the bad one. Read more in our HIPS section Home Improvers Protection Solution on our main site.

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Jason Costner of Saltburn, North Yorkshire was jailed after leaving one pensioner with no water in her bathroom for five months and another with a hole in his roof over Christmas – in the snow.

The Daily Mail reported yesterday that a rogue trader has been jailed for leaving a trail of destruction and misery in his wake, not to mention the financial pain he inflicted. You can see their full story by clicking on the photo above.

Costner gained the confidence of people by offering his services free or for very little money, and then started to charge large sums of money, before turning abusive and threatening. He even managed to pocket money received from an insurance claim without completing the promised work.

He was arrested for fraud in September 2011, and received an 18 month sentence on Monday.

DIY Doctor wants to eradicate Cowboy Builders

We have been working on various ways to arm yourself against getting caught by Cowboy Builders. We continually update this information as we develop new advice and products to help keep you safe.

On the main website you will see a button ‘HIPS’ which stands for Home Improver Protection Solution. OK so we know that isn’t as catchy as it could be, but the information in there is invaluable if you are having work done on your house. The information is free and so are most of the products. (Where something is not free we clearly say so).

What’s new?

Lots of sites give you advice on avoiding Cowboy Builders, but we also give you some tools to weed them out and help you choose good builders.

The latest addition to the website is a product called Price Doctor. The basic product is Free and takes about five minutes to use.

Price Doctor allows you to find out how much your extension should cost you before you speak to your builder, or if you already have quotes from builders it allows you to check that those quotes are reasonable.

How often have you heard the advice ‘get three quotes and pick the middle one’ but how do you know any of them are right? They might all be too much or,worse, too little.

How can a quote that is too cheap be a problem?

You might think it is great if you get cheap quotes but if the builder gets to your job and realises he hasn’t quoted enough, he will need to find ‘extras’ to charge you, and these can be hefty.

A good and experienced builder will quote you based on his knowledge of similar jobs, and so any extras will be legitimately unforeseen things. (In our building days, we once found an old Morris Minor buried in a garden when the diggers went to dig the foundations for a conservatory. That is a legitimate extra, it could not have been foreseen by anyone!)

Check your quote with Price Doctor before making your decision

If you know your builders quotes are about right you can be sure they are pricing correctly which means they know what they are doing and they are fair about what they charge. This is a good sign!

If your preferred builder has quoted significantly more you can ask him to look at the Price Doctor quote with you, you could even go through the process together. He might have a good reason for being more expensive, but at least it gives you a tool for negotiating with your builder.

Some builders are using our full level of Price Doctor to prepare their building quotes, in the knowledge that Price Doctor provides a clear and transparent quote for the homeowner. The more comprehensive versions of Price Doctor do cost money but for £20 you get increased choices for your build, a ‘shopping list’ of materials and you can also get a professional model which allows you to build in profit margins and trade discounts on materials.

What else do you have that protects me against Cowboy Builders?

We will continue to add to this list as time goes on but these are the main areas to help you avoid cowboy builders so far.

• Desired Outcome contract
• Guidance notes for entering into a contract with your builder
• Advice on using a payment plan
• Advice on finding a tradesman

Go to DIY Doctors Home Improver Protection Solution section to see all our advice, products and information to help you find a reliable builder and avoid the cowboy.

To try Price Doctor for yourself please click on the banner below, and do let us know how you got on with it.

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The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has expressed concerns about
installers of energy-efficient products using high-pressure tactics to ensure that customers sign up.

Following their investigation the OFT have written to fifty leading installers of energy-saving products to insist that they improve their practices.

The OFT found various problems which ranged from, paperwork issues, to staying in a customers home for up to three hours, to failing to provide information on the customers rights to cancellation.

Energy Saving Installations expected to increase because of the Green Deal
As the Green Deal comes into effect this month this sector of the building industry is expected to experience growth, while the rest of the building industry is suffering from contraction. So it is vital that steps are taken to improve consumer confidence in installers of energy-efficient products.

The Green Deal will allow homeowners to have energy saving work carried out on their house and then pay for that work by adding the cost to their energy bills. We have written more about the Green Deal in our Projects section.

How to Avoid Cowboy Builders
DIY Doctor has been working to help consumers avoid Cowboy Builders for years. we do this with a variety of measures listed under our Home Improvement Protection Solution (HIPS) section of the website.

The information is free and includes a ‘Desired Outcome Contract’ designed to be used by homeowners who are employing builders and installers, there is also information on finding reputable tradesmen through Trust Mark. To help protect your payments there is information about Bond Pay which securely holds the money for the contracted work; only paying the contractor once each stage of the work is completed.

How to stay safe when employing energy-saving installers

If you are considering having energy saving work on your house, then you can read through the information in our Home Improver Protection Solution section to help you employ the right installer for the job. As a brief guide to avoiding a situation where you feel pressured into buying energy-saving products follow these steps:

• Don’t employ cold callers
• Ask friends for recommendations, if they have had similar work to yours
• Ask the installer for references from customers who have had similar work to yours
• Don’t expect an installer to be able to give you a price over the phone
• When booking appointments make it clear you will not decide on the day they call
• Ask about cancellation procedures when booking the appointment
• If the installers seem pushy on the phone don’t book an appointment
• Make appointments with three installers and keep notes on each one, so you can compare like-with-like
• It is a good idea to have someone else with you who can ensure you ask all you should and help you take notes

There is more information on our HIPS package here.

If you want to find out more about the Green Deal we have project pages under our Green Living section which you might also find very useful.

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While DIY Doctor is broadly in favour of making planning regulations less bound up with red tape they have to agree with TrustMark who warn that consumers need more advice when planning building works – and the bigger the project the more guidance they may need.

TrustMark and DIY Doctor are both very keen to promote good, honest, reliable tradesmen and to try to eradicate the cowboy builder.

As the chairman of Trustmark, Liz Male, comments: “. . . through initiatives like this and the forthcoming Green Deal, the risk is that we leave too many people at the mercy of rogue traders and cowboy builders . . . If Government wishes to deregulate this sector, even for a short period, then it must also help by signposting people to reputable firms and good sources of advice.”

Trustmark is a government-endorsed agency which has over 21,000 licenced tradespeople on their website. To be eligible to be be listed every firm is inspected and checked by experienced inspectors.  DIY Doctor has chosen to work solely in conjunction with TrustMark to help homeowners find reputable tradespersons to carry out building works on their homes. They are the only online trades listing who ensure the firms are accredited. To find suitable tradespeople in your area visit DIY Doctor’s find a tradesman area.

Liz Male adds: “We would always advise anyone considering building an extension, conservatory, loft conversion or other major building work to use a contract with their tradesmen. The free TrustMark app is a particularly important tool that can help with that, prompting you to ask all the right questions.”

We have a free building contract on DIY Doctor which will help to clarify all the stages of your project and if used properly will improve communication between you and your builder, avoiding some of the pitfalls, and helping to resolve any possible disputes.

Go to our section on Home Improvement Protection Solution (HIPS) where you can download a free Desired Outcome Contract.

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