Builder gone bust - or have they?!

lucicrisp

Hi - apologies if this is the wrong area and also if it's a bit long, but it's a painful story! We recently engaged a company (don't know if I am allowed to mention them by name but happy to divulge!) to do some remodelling at our house. We were told they could start 9th Feb and were asked to pay a deposit of £6,200 in advance.

Originally we were told we could pay by credit card, which would have been great, but eventually we were asked for a cheque - not so good. You can guess the rest - the company are now apparently in administration. I say 'apparently' as part of the company appears to have been purchased by another company who have taken on their unfinished jobs but seemingly with no liabilities?

In addition, we signed and returned a 'deposit protection insurance' agreement which should have protected us, but have been advised by the administrators that that may not pay out as the building company may not have paid the premiums!

So:a)Any ideas as to how we get our money back, and

b)If we engage another builder and they don't have the facility to accept credit cards (so we get covered by Section 75) is there some kind of insurance available to cover us if they go bust too?

We have pretty much writen the money off but it would be nice to get something back from these cowboys.......

TomsMom

I can't really answer either of your questions but I will tell you what happened with our builders.

Once the job was agreed we were given a starting date. That's it. No deposit was asked for and I don't think it's a good idea anyway. If they ask for money up front for materials, fair enough but you'd need to know what they were supplying and make sure you were only handing enough over for that. Once they've started work then it would be reasonable to pay for work done but not in advance.

I don't know how much your job was costed at or what % your deposit represented, but our job was in the region of £30,000 so it's not a case of a big job needs a deposit.

Our builders have been paid by 3 main stage payments. If we've asked them to do extras (we asked for french doors and some other small additions) then they invoiced us for those separately as they weren't included in the original quote.