I lost £25,000 to cowboy builders – my kids still don’t have bedrooms

Claire Dickenson, 49, thought she had done everything right when choosing a builder to carry out a “substantial” two-storey extension on her home near Birmingham. She was therefore shocked when work came to a “grinding halt” over a year later, after she refused to pay an extra £10,000 for roof work her builder said he had “forgotten” to bill her for nine months previously. “How you can accidentally forget about £10,000 is beyond me,” Dickenson said. “We’d already paid extra for that roof because of his incompetence.” Three years after the work started in April 2023, Dickenson’s two teenage children still don’t have bedrooms and the house is not legally sound. She is now part of a group of victims of cowboy builders who are campaigning to make this behaviour a criminal offence, so that builders such as the one she experienced, can face justice. ‘My husband got an electric shock’ Initially, it seemed as though the project was going smoothly. However, the problems started once the external work was completed by bricklayers, and the main builder – who we have chosen not to name – was meant to be the one turning up to work on their house every day. “He’d come in, do a flurry of work, get his stage payment and then disappear for a good few weeks,” the homeowner from near Birmingham said. “It got to the point where the neighbours walking past with their dogs were going, ‘ha ha, no builder today?’.” “We had leaking ceilings where he didn’t bother to cover it up properly. One day we woke up and we had completely frozen pipes. My husband was out there with a hair dryer because he hadn’t lagged the temporary piping at all,” Dickenson said.The family lived without a kitchen for three years because the temporary kitchen the builder installed was faulty, giving Dickenson’s husband an electric shock. The kitchen was unusable when the builder stopped attending the property, after demanding more money “It was hell on earth. It was supposed to be nine months of difficulty, which we were set up for turned into three years,” she said. “My kids [10 and 13 when the work started] haven’t had a bedroom they can call their own for three years. My daughter’s in a temporary bedroom because he put holes through the ceiling and of course he said, ‘Oh, I’ll fix that’ – that room shouldn’t have been touched.” ‘He set the debt collector on us’ Dickenson and her husband John had agreed a price of £141,000 for what was meant to be a nine-month job when work started. “We’d agreed to stage payments, we’d got a contract, we’d spoken to three previous customers, we’d checked out his work,” she said. In the summer of 2024, months after the work should have been completed, the builder started demanding extra payments outside of the stage payments. Dickenson and her husband paid the first time because they did not feel they had a choice. “We felt that if we didn’t, he wouldn’t come back and by that point you’re beholden to them essentially because they’re in your house,” she said. “It becomes very difficult to say no, I suppose.” Dickenson’s daughter’s bedroom, which wasn’t part of the renovations, with a hole in the ceiling. After he asked for several more payments of thousands of pounds, Dickenson grew suspicious and asked to have a meeting about the extra costs – which was when things took a turn. “The next day he sent us a last invoice, for £2,300, at 7pm. At nine o’clock the next morning, we got an e-mail from a debt collector chasing us for the money,” she added. Dickenson said at this point she and her husband “didn’t know what to do”. “We felt like we’d entered into Alice in Wonderland world, to be frank,” she said. Campaign to criminalise cowboys The Dickensons estimate they lost £25,000 to the builder overall. With the help of friends and neighbours they’ve managed to repair most of the damage caused by the rogue builder, but they haven’t wanted to hire a professional because they can’t “trust anybody” after what happened. “We can’t sell the property, not that we’re planning on moving, but if we happened to want to sell, at the moment we haven’t got any of the regulatory sign offs because he’s wandered off,” she said. Last month, the Government announced a scheme to protect homeowners from cowboy builders, with payments held in an Escrow scheme until the work is completed. Dickenson thinks this is a “good start” but that Government should go further and make what happened to her a crime, rather than a civil matter. Dickenson has discovered that the builder who overcharged her has done the same to five others, and although she has reported him to the Trading Standards Authority, she thinks he should be prosecuted. Claire and John had help from friends and neighbours to repair most of the damage, but they can’t hire another builder because they no longer trust them She said: “It would feel like more justice if someone was getting a criminal conviction for this.” Dickenson is involved with Campaign for Accountable Skilled Trades (CAST), which is calling on the government to improve the regulation of builders through Trading Standards and new legislation. A representative of CAST told The i Paper: “We need to get this industry back in control with the professionals, the decent builders that care about their industry. And the only way to do that is accountability, if we kick these criminals out of their industry.” “They’re destroying families’ homes, they’re destroying their lives, they’re destroying their health. And it needs to stop.” A Government spokesperson said: “We are clamping down on cowboy builders and rogue bailiffs which is why we’ve launched a scheme which helps people identify and hire trusted traders with confidence. “We will continue working to protect consumers, support reputable traders and make sure people can spend their hard-earned cash without being ripped off.”