Andy Burnham’s cowboy builder clampdown, announced this week, rests on a principle that consumer advocates are already calling its central weakness: participation is entirely voluntary. Rogue operators, by definition, will not queue up to join a database that holds them to account.
The government’s new scheme, launching next month, will create a register of trusted traders and a staged-payment system under which customers’ money is held in an escrow-style account and released only as project milestones are met. Traders who sign up must demonstrate standards of customer service, transparency, and dispute resolution. Those who refuse to sign up face no consequence whatsoever.
The Cowboy Builder Clampdown and the Voluntary Problem
Liberal Democrat business spokesperson Sarah Olney put it bluntly: ‘Rogue operators won’t voluntarily sign up, they will simply keep exploiting families in the shadows.’ It is difficult to argue with the logic.
The government’s case rests on the scale of the problem. More than a quarter of people who carried out home improvements in the past 18 months reported experiencing problems, including builders disappearing after upfront payments were made. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Consumer Detriment Survey 2024 puts the net monetised loss for home and garden maintenance services at £10.3 billion, representing 14% of the UK’s total consumer detriment. The median individual loss in the sector was £94.60. It is worth noting that the 95% confidence interval on that £10.3 billion figure runs from -£2.3 billion to £22.9 billion, which illustrates the difficulty of pinning down a market defined by informal transactions and underreporting. Only 12% of adults who purchased services from the sector reported any detriment at all.
Prime Minister Burnham said rogue tradespeople left families with ‘months of stress’ and gave their ‘decent, hardworking’ counterparts a bad name. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds framed the scheme as enabling people to ‘spend their money with greater confidence and security.’ The political language is unimpeachable. The mechanism is shakier.
The National Federation of Builders (NFB) was candid on the point. Adas Rico Wojtulewicz-Richmond, the NFB’s director of policy, told BBC Breakfast: ‘Is this scheme going to stop bad actors operating and ripping people off? I don’t think it will.’ His preferred solution is a project ‘passport’ recording all work done on a property, which he argued would expose poor-quality firms and raise industry standards. It is a more structural idea than a voluntary register, and the government has not adopted it.
Shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith took a different line, warning the scheme risks ‘piling more paperwork onto the majority of businesses who already do the right thing.’ His argument is that enforcement and sentencing, not an app, are what deter fraud. He is not entirely wrong either, though the two things are not mutually exclusive.
Bailiff Regulation: A Second Front With Its Own Delays
Alongside the builder scheme, the government announced plans to regulate private bailiffs in England and Wales. Under the new rules, private bailiffs will be required to be accredited by the Enforcement Conduct Board (ECB), or to work for a firm that holds ECB accreditation, according to the Money Advice Trust. People facing enforcement action will also gain access to an independent complaints process.
The backstory here is longer than the announcement implies. The Ministry of Justice opened a formal consultation on debt enforcement regulation on 9 June 2025, which closed on 21 July 2025, according to the House of Commons Library. The government said at the time that legislation would follow ‘as soon as parliamentary time allows.’ That was over a year ago.
The Guardian reported in June 2026 that the bailiff industry collects more than £1 billion a year from indebted people in England and Wales, and that the ECB itself had criticised the ‘lack of visible progress’ and ‘no clear plan’ a year after the original pledge. The government is now, apparently, providing one.
The GOV.UK consultation document on debt enforcement confirms that the existing statutory framework, the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, implemented in 2014, currently governs how enforcement agents operate and the fees they charge. The government’s position is that an independent statutory regulator would not cover public sector enforcement agents or County Court Bailiffs, only private-sector operators.
Taken together, Thursday’s announcements represent the government doing something about two consumer protection problems that have sat unresolved for years. Whether a voluntary trader register can achieve what mandatory licensing cannot is the question that will determine whether this is a policy or a press release. The answer will come when the first rogue builder ignores the scheme entirely, pockets a deposit, and disappears, and the government has to explain what, precisely, it does next.
