The rogue builder crackdown promised by the government sounds reassuring until you remember that the builders who destroyed Sheri Ingram’s life were already breaking laws that existed. Lee Slocombe, who ran his operation through a Swansea company called Kamlee Builders, defrauded nine victims out of £400,000 while on Crown Court bail for earlier offences. He was sentenced to six years at Cardiff Crown Court on 11 February 2026. The law caught him. Eventually.
Ingram was in her early twenties when Slocombe dismantled her then-boyfriend’s home in the south Wales valleys. He stripped out floorboards, floor joists, the staircase, the walls, the ceiling. He propped the first floor on metal poles and threw rubble out the back. He kept finding new problems and requesting more money. The couple budgeted £8,000; they ended up handing over roughly £14,000, including £6,000 borrowed from family. Then Slocombe disappeared.
What makes this case instructive is not just the brazenness of it. Slocombe offered cheap rates because he claimed to have leftover materials, asked for money upfront, and kept escalating the bill with new discoveries. Every one of those behaviours is a well-documented warning sign. Yet Ingram, young and newly out of university, had no easy way to check his record or his credentials before work began.
The rogue builder crackdown: what the new tools actually do
Among Andy Burnham’s early priorities as prime minister is a register of trusted traders, due to go live this month. Alongside it sits a Trusted Payment app, backed by the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. The app delays milestone payments by 24 hours, so consumers can cancel if they feel pressured. Payments for completed work are held in escrow by the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman until both parties are satisfied. Projects above £2,500 carry a two-year warranty. Traders who ignore ombudsman decisions can be removed from the platform entirely.
James Walker, the app’s director, is candid about what it cannot do. ‘We are not going to stop a rogue trader going out,’ he says, ‘but we are providing a trusted mechanism so you know if you use this process you are protected.’ That is an honest pitch. The system works only if consumers choose it from the outset, before a Slocombe type shows up at the door quoting suspiciously low rates.
The scale of the underlying problem justifies the intervention. Citizens Advice reported in July that 4.8 million homeowners had experienced a problem with a home repair job in the previous 18 months. Around 1.7 million had paid extra to fix botched earlier work or been overcharged outright, losing an average of £750 each. For one in 10 of those people, the extra cost topped £5,000.
When the perpetrator knocks on the door
Paul Boielle, 82, was not looking for a builder when one found him. It was shortly after his wife’s funeral, and three men knocked on his door offering to look at his roof. Before he had fully understood what was happening, the tiles were off. Among them was David Vincent, then 33, of Barnfield Road, Orpington, who was later sentenced to 28 months in prison after pleading guilty to fraud by false representation and engaging in unfair commercial practices.
Vincent’s team told Boielle the damage was far worse than it appeared and quoted him £30,000 for a full replacement, roughly twice the going rate. Boielle paid a £5,000 deposit. The work was finished in 48 hours. Hertfordshire Trading Standards found that Vincent had grossly overcharged him, done the work to a poor standard, and failed to disclose the right to cancel. It took most of the following year to put the roof right.
No app would have stopped Vincent’s knock. Doorstep selling by unsolicited traders is a separate and older problem, and the proposed register addresses it only indirectly: if consumers know to look for registered traders, they become marginally more sceptical of those who arrive uninvited. Marginally.
Rico Wojtulewicz, head of policy and market insight at the National Federation of Builders, thinks the government’s approach misses the structural point. His preference is a digital building passport for every property: a logbook of all significant work, recording who carried it out and flagging substandard results against the responsible firm. ‘If it subsequently fails, or is found to be substandard, that should be recorded against the builder responsible,’ he says. It is a more radical idea, and probably a more durable one, because it embeds accountability in the property rather than relying on consumers to seek out the right platform before hiring.
The register and the app are genuine improvements. But their protection is opt-in, and the worst cowboys tend to find customers who don’t yet know they need protecting. The Slocombe case is a reminder that serial offenders accumulate victims precisely because each one assumes they are the first. A passport tied to the building, rather than a register tied to the trader’s willingness to join it, would close that gap. Whether Burnham’s government has the appetite to legislate for that is the question worth watching.
