There is no government register of builders.
That is worth stating plainly, because the August 2026 announcement has been widely reported as though one now exists. It does not. Anyone can still trade as a builder in England with no qualification, no registration and no insurance requirement, exactly as they could before.
What was announced is government backing for two voluntary schemes, both privately operated. Understanding what each covers, and where the cover stops, matters for anyone commissioning work or advising clients who do.
What was actually announced on 28 August 2026?
The GOV.UK announcement of 28 August 2026 set out support for two things.
The first is Trusted Payments, a commercial app combining milestone payments, a warranty and dispute resolution. The second is an Approved Code for the home improvement sector, being developed by the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman under the Chartered Trading Standards Institute’s Approved Code Scheme.
Neither is created by statute. Neither is run by government. Neither carries enforcement powers.
The word “register” has attached itself to the story, and it is the wrong word. A register implies a list you can search and a bar you can fail. There is no list and no bar.
How does Trusted Payments work, and where does the cover stop?
The mechanism is escrow. Payments move through Open Banking via an FCA authorised payment provider, and the completion payment is held by the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman until the project is finished and signed off.
That is a genuine protection, and it addresses the single most common failure pattern in domestic building work, which is money leaving the homeowner ahead of the work being done.
The limits are where trade readers should pay attention, because they are not being reported.
Warranty cover runs for three months during construction. After completion it runs twelve months for projects at or below £2,500, and twenty-four months for projects above that. Maximum cover is £20,000, underwritten by an FCA authorised insurer, covering the contractor ceasing to trade, abandonment and scam protection.
Twenty thousand pounds is a meaningful sum against a bathroom refit. Against a loft conversion, a side return or a whole-house refurbishment it is a fraction of contract value. The cap is not scaled to the job.
Transaction fees are charged to the homeowner and set at project start.
And the app does not vet anybody. It works with organisations that vet trades within their own schemes, naming TrustMark, Book a Builder, BALI and Buy with Confidence. So the credential layer underneath is the same set of voluntary schemes that existed before the announcement.
Government stated the app would go live with over 100,000 traders able to access it before the end of September 2026.
What is the Approved Code, and is it live?
The Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman is an independent not-for-profit alternative dispute resolution provider that has operated since 1992. Its new code sits under the CTSI Approved Code Scheme, which CTSI describes as the UK’s only sector-wide code framework audited by Chartered Trading Standards Practitioners.
Membership is voluntary. Businesses signing up demonstrate they meet higher standards of customer service, transparency and dispute resolution.
Government’s stated timeline was live with first retailers by the end of September 2026 and fully live by December 2026. Anyone citing the code should check the CTSI code directory at the point of writing, since the home improvement code had not appeared in it as of late September 2026.
Why voluntary schemes struggle with the specific problem
The structural objection is straightforward, and it came from the regulator’s own side on the day of the announcement.
CTSI welcomed the measures while urging government to go further, with its chief executive stating that a compulsory licensing scheme for trades operating in or on consumers’ homes remains essential. The Federation of Master Builders has campaigned on the same point for years.
The reasoning is that opt-in schemes are joined by the traders least likely to cause harm. A contractor willing to route payments through escrow, accept an ombudsman’s jurisdiction and submit to a code audit is, almost by definition, not the contractor the scheme is designed to protect people from.
There is harder evidence than that, and it is the most uncomfortable finding in the whole area. Citizens Advice research reported in July 2026 found that consumers using accredited or larger, brand-name traders were no less likely to experience problems than those using sole traders.
Accreditation, on that evidence, is a floor rather than a guarantee. It should inform a decision. It should not end one.
Which schemes do carry legal force?
This is where the practical advice diverges from most of what is written on the subject.
Competent person schemes have a statutory footing under the Building Regulations. There are sixteen authorised schemes, listed by MHCLG, covering specified work types: Gas Safe for gas, NICEIC and NAPIT for electrical work, FENSA for windows, HETAS and APHC for heating, CompetentRoofer for roof coverings.
Registered installers self-certify that their work complies with the Building Regulations, which bypasses building control and produces a compliance certificate.
That certificate is the thing a conveyancer asks for years later. For landlords refinancing or selling, missing certification is the risk that surfaces at the worst moment, and no voluntary scheme membership substitutes for it.
The distinction to hold onto is that competent person schemes are trade-specific and work-type-specific. They certify that a particular piece of notifiable work complies. They are not a general check on whether a builder is any good.
Where does the Building Safety Regulator fit?
It does not, for this market, and the confusion is common enough to be worth clearing up.
The Building Safety Regulator became a standalone non-departmental public body sponsored by MHCLG on 27 January 2026, having previously sat within the Health and Safety Executive. Its building control remit covers higher-risk buildings, defined as those of at least seven storeys or eighteen metres containing two or more residential units, along with hospitals and care homes.
Domestic extensions, refurbishments and the buy-to-let repairs market sit entirely outside that remit.
What does the evidence say about scale?
The numbers justify the attention, whatever one makes of the remedy.
Citizens Advice research published on 7 July 2026, based on a survey of 5,000 UK adults responsible for home repairs, found that 4.8 million homeowners faced a problem in the preceding eighteen months, and that a quarter of homeowners reported problems with their most recent repair job.
Of those, 1.7 million had to pay more money to fix earlier work or were overcharged. The average loss was £750, though for one in ten the extra costs exceeded £5,000. Thirty-seven per cent said the experience made them feel stressed and twelve per cent said it made them feel unsafe. Eighty-two per cent hit barriers trying to resolve it.
The behavioural consequence is its own market story. Twenty-eight per cent carried out work themselves instead, and twenty-six per cent delayed or avoided repairs altogether.
On complaint volumes, Citizens Advice reported in August 2025 that its consumer service handled 36,534 complaints about home maintenance and improvements in a year, more than 700 a week. Just over half, 19,281, concerned substandard services, and one in seven, 5,230, involved scams or rogue traders.
By work type, roofing and chimney work led with 8,126 complaints, 22.2 per cent of the total. Major renovations accounted for 4,365, windows and doors 3,856, plumbing 2,629 and fitted kitchens 2,594.
On enforcement, the National Trading Standards Annual Report for 2025-26 records 24 successful prosecutions producing 54 convictions through its Regional Investigation Teams, with 28 defendants receiving custodial sentences totalling 102 years. It puts consumer and business detriment avoided at £12,276,263.
Set that last figure against the scale of the problem and the enforcement gap speaks for itself.
One caution on a widely repeated number. The government announcement cites a figure of over £10.3bn lost in 2024 on home and garden maintenance through losses, overpriced costs or unfair practices. The release does not identify an underlying published study, so it is best attributed to the announcement rather than presented as an independent research finding.
FMB research from July 2025, surveying 2,051 UK adults, offers a separate estimate of £14.3bn lost to cowboy builders over five years, based on 15 per cent of adults reporting losses averaging £1,758.80. The same survey found 81 per cent of homeowners support mandatory builder licensing, and that nearly half wrongly believe builders are already licensed.
That last finding may be the most consequential of all. Half the market is making commissioning decisions on a false assumption about how regulated the market is.
What should a homeowner or landlord actually check?
Start with the part that has legal force rather than the part with the best branding.
Check the trade-specific statutory route first. Gas work against the Gas Safe Register, electrical, window, heating and roofing work against the relevant competent person scheme on the government list. That is the only layer that produces a Building Regulations compliance certificate.
Check Companies House for incorporation date, filing history, directors and previous dissolved companies. Successive companies behind the same trading name is the pattern that recurs through enforcement casework.
Check vetting scheme membership, knowing what the Citizens Advice finding says about its predictive value.
Verify insurance directly with the insurer rather than from a document the contractor supplies. Public liability, and for structural work contractors’ all risks. Landlords should confirm the policy responds to works on a tenanted property.
And ask whether the contractor will work through escrow. A refusal tells you something. So does who pays the fee.
Which contract terms actually protect you?
A written contract does most of the work here, and its absence does most of the damage.
The JCT Home Owner contracts and the RIBA Domestic Building Contract both fix scope, price, start and completion dates, a variations procedure and a dispute route. Without one, you are left with the implied terms of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, which require reasonable care and skill, a reasonable price and a reasonable time. Those are real protections, but proving breach of a reasonableness standard is far harder than proving breach of a written term.
Staged payments against defined milestones are the second protection, and the principle is simple. Payment should lag the work, never lead it. Front-loaded deposits are the mechanism through which almost all of the losses in the Citizens Advice data occur.
Retention is the third, typically a small percentage held through a defects period after practical completion. It is the only leverage that survives handover, and it is routinely dropped from domestic contracts.
Fourth, distinguish a builder’s warranty from an insurance-backed warranty. A promise from a company that subsequently dissolves is worth nothing. A claim against an insurer survives the company. Check who underwrites it, what the cap is and how long it runs.
Fifth, pay deposits by credit card where you can. Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 gives a joint claim against the card issuer on transactions between £100 and £30,000.
Most of these are standard on commercial contracts and absent on domestic ones, which is precisely why domestic clients carry risk that a commercial client would never accept. Firms structured around fixed price from an agreed scope with milestone-linked payments, as Beams Renovation in London works, put the contractual architecture in place as a matter of course rather than leaving it to the client to request. That is the practical difference between a contract that anticipates failure and one that discovers it.
What would have to change?
Statutory licensing is the measure the trade bodies and the trading standards profession both want, and it is not in the August announcement.
The live legislative vehicle is the Domestic Building Works (Consumer Protection) Bill, a Private Members’ Bill introduced by Mark Garnier on 20 March 2025 and awaiting second reading. Private Members’ Bills rarely become law without government backing, and government has instead chosen to support voluntary schemes.
Until that changes, the position is unchanged in substance. Escrow and an ombudsman code are useful additions to a homeowner’s toolkit. They are not a licensing regime, they are not a register, and they should not be described as one.
Sources
GOV.UK announcement on protecting families from cowboy builders and aggressive bailiffs, 28 August 2026, for the schemes announced and the timelines given.
Trusted Payments, for the escrow mechanism, warranty tiers, cover cap, fee structure and vetting partners.
Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman and the CTSI Approved Code Scheme directory, for the Approved Code, its sponsor and its status.
Chartered Trading Standards Institute response, 28 August 2026, for its position on mandatory licensing.
Citizens Advice, Home repair problems hit one in four homeowners, 7 July 2026, for survey findings on problem rates, losses and consumer response.
Citizens Advice consumer service complaint data, August 2025, for complaint volumes and breakdown by work type.
Federation of Master Builders research, July 2025, for loss estimates and homeowner attitudes to licensing, and its July 2026 publication with Citizens Advice for the accreditation finding.
National Trading Standards Annual Report 2025-26, for prosecution, conviction, sentencing and detriment figures.
MHCLG list of authorised competent person schemes, for the statutory self-certification routes.
Building Safety Regulator strategic plan 2026 to 2027, for its status and higher-risk building remit.
Domestic Building Works (Consumer Protection) Bill, UK Parliament bills tracker, for its status.
