Getting money back from cowboy builders

lisawaters

Butti wrote: »

You don't have to be as eloquent as Mike, isn't he starting a new career as a novelist?

Hello Catherine,



I just wanted to say thank you to yourself, the production team and all the DIY'ers at DIY SOS for choosing and doing Mike's House. I went down to work on the site as one of Mike's Mob for a couple of days and it was an absolute highlight of 2010 for me. The team are an absolute delight to work with and the end product bore no resemblance to what had gone before.



It's nice to think that if enough people are concerned to make enough noise about somebody's personal circumstances then they can be heard and something can be done. I have watched the programme and it made fantastic viewing so hopefully the team are pleased too.



I thought the team were fantastic, talking to the public but being professional on the job. Julia in particular seems to have a very long fuse before she eventually lost it. What they didn't show on the programme was that her flower boxes had been assaulted by things coming out of the windows for most of the day. And I think Billy should be a prescription on the NHS for depression. Being greeted every morning by him with the words 'Ello darlin, how are you? give us a kiss' must be one of the best anecdotes to feeling blue.



So thank you again for responding to our collective cry for help and having Mike's Mob as a key theme in the programme. We have been heard.

Just say what you think- or in my case maybe I should stop saying what I think!

B

A brief but succinct masterclass...

x

niccatw

Oh God. I'm watching Dancing on Ice (yes, shamelessly addicted) and Jedward just appeared on an advert. I did actually laugh out loud. Does any-one know if there's a cure for this kind of horrific affliction?

lisawaters

niccatw wrote: »

Butti, is there something you're not telling us?

Mike, I'm still mulling over what to write. I haven't yet found the right words to [eloquently] convey what I feel. (You stole them all from me in your lovely letter! :rotfl:)

So steal them back and claim them as yours... you've written enough theses to know how the game works.

x

MatyMoo

Beautifully said Butti......

....... in about 2000 words less than I managed

I'm hooked in Dancing on Ice too Nicca

Big_Mac_TMMM

I've got a couple of unsolicited suggestions for Mike:

DIY SOS download: It is always hard to find posts in the middle of threads, as they vanish into the past. I would suggest that you go back to your first post in this thread, edit it and then add something like:

"EDIT: If you want to see the episode of DIY SOS, please see this post for details."

And you could either link to the post from the words "this post" or post the link to that post, after that sentence. (Just in case you have never noticed, every post number on the forum, is a link specifically to that exact post. This means that if you want to link to the post with the download from other places, like Facebook, you can click it and copy the address from your browser. If you really want to be clever, you can also right click the numbers, to grab the URL.)

Facebook: Maybe you could create a "Paul Bridle wrecked my house" page on Facebook, and post some of the photos of how bad your house was. That way, if anyone Google's his name, they might find your page* and avoid dealing with him. If there was a page like that, people could "Like" the page and "Suggest" the page to all of their UK friends.

* = Assuming that Facebook doesn't delete the page.

Getting legal help: If you can't find lawyers to help, have you considered legal students? There are a number of universities where people go to study law, and if you can get someone to put an advert on the student's noticeboard, perhaps some students might get in touch with you. Just looking in London I see The City Law School and the School of Law at Queen Mary: University of London. There must be a ton of other legal schools in the South East. Every one is a place, where you might be able to find a friendly student. (Even if students can't afford to do things totally for free, you might be able to find some non-cash way to pay for their time. With student fees set to rise, you might even be able to rescue a trainee lawyer, who needs money saving help.)

Teaming up with other people ripped off by Paul: You mentioned that Paul has at least one other CCJ and thought there were more. Have you considered trying to hook up with the other people Paul has ripped off? If you can locate these people, you can compare notes and see if any one of you can identify an angle that the rest of you can use to chase him.

For example, if your case is not the only occasion where Paul has "hidden behind his wife's skirts" you might be able to gather enough proof to start some sort of joint-action between everyone who is owed money and the pair of them. Maybe if one person with a CCJ can get her on the stand and ask her about the cash her husband has been paying her, that might help remove her future ability to claim that she is not involved with what he has been doing.

(I don't really look for this sort of thing in the press, but I wonder if your case was reported in the local papers in your area. And if it was, I wonder if other cases were reported in local papers in the areas where Paul was operating. Maybe someone on the MSE forums knows how to dig out old stories from newspaper archives.)

Trading Standards: From what I could understand, Trading Standards refusing to pursue Paul was based on their belief that he had only ripped you off. But if he has several CCJs, then he has ripped off a number of other people too. Perhaps you could go back to Trading Standards with one or more of the others and show Trading Standards that he has moved into an area where they need to take action.

(I think one problem with Trading Standards is that they seem to be a local council service. So if Paul has been ripping off one person per county, that might not show up on their RADAR. But if you can add your support to a person ripped off in a different area, perhaps you can get another Trading Standards office to help them.)

Present/future victims: Another possiblity, is that there may be people out there, who have been ripped off, but have not yet got to the same stage as you. I am not sure how you would search for people like that, but if people could find them, then you could share your own experience and pass advice to them, that speeds up their case. (And it would be very interesting if Paul told another judge that he had one CCJ, but the person against him could list off the names of half a dozen of you and ask the judge to take that attempt to lie in court into account.)

Stopping people getting caught: I may be mistaken, but you seem to be suggesting that you have seen Paul trying to rip off other people. And one of the posters seemed to be suggesting that they had a close shave with Paul. If Paul is trying to do this to other people, I wonder if it would be possible to find out where he is touting for business and bombard the area with "warning: cowboy builder working in your area" leaflets that can save others from getting ripped off.

There is only so much that can fit onto a leaflet, but if you can get something online, you could perhaps encourage people to go there for more information. Someone with the skill to do it could perhaps put some clips form the DIY SOS episode onto YouTube, and people could see the mess he made of your house.

The book idea: I know a couple of people have suggested a book. I'm not sure if this is something you fancy doing, but having spent ages reading this thread, I think that a summarisation of it could help show what a cowboy builder (in this case Paul) can do to someone's life (in this case your life). Now that you have got your house to be habitable, if you want to think about finding a way to help cowboy builders from doing this to other people, your story could actually be a very powerful tool. All this sort of stuff is very abstract. And when stuff is in courts, I think those sort of people just see you as some sheets of paper to be argued upon. But if you want to get people mobilised, your story shows clearly that the existing law does not work and that we need some sort of regulation to prevent other people getting shafted and left in the same sort of situation as you.

I'm not sure you intended to become famous, in fact you seemed like you didn't want to tell people your name a year back, but if your name and your story can become something you can use to get people to pay attention to how serious this is, you could help create a focus that other people can get behind.

(This might be pretty stressful, so you probably should think very very carefully before doing this.)

The law: It seems to me that you have tried every logical alternative. I could be wrong, but you seem pretty clued up on the situation and it seems to me that the law is broken. It is based on you using the courts against the person who ripped you off and does not do anything to help you get sorted out.

The entire situation is a chase, where you pay lawyers to chase the person who owes you cash and don't actually get your cash back unless they win.

It seems to me that this sort of thing is a "risk" and that there should be some sort of mandatory "insurance" to protect people from this "risk". Drivers have to have insurance that covers other people they might crash into. I think that builders carrying out major projects should have insurance to cover people that get left in the lurch if they go out of business or default on a job.

And I think that insurance alone, will not help, as cowboys will probably not take it out. So I think it needs to be compulsory insurance and it needs to be a criminal offence to start a big construction project without cover. Driving without insurance is an offence. I think it should be treated similar to that. (If you think about Paul has "crashed into your house" with his construction company. I don't know if he intended to rip you off, before he met you, or just got into trouble and decided to run away with your cash, but it doesn't really mater. If he "crashed into your house with a lorry", it would have been fixed by the insurance company.)

I also think that there needs to be a compensation fund to help out people who get stung by the people who are not covered. If we can have "no win no fee" companies that go out to make claims against people**, I don't see why the government could not have set up a Construction Disaster Fund, that would have paid for your house to be made habitable (if not decorated to DIY SOS quality) and then went after Paul later, to recover the costs from him (and help top up the fund for future times). I think that a fund, like that, would have allowed you to get on your feet quicker and (more importantly) be out working again faster and paying the tax you want to pay. It is kind of stupidity that the government has left it to the MSE crew and the BBC to fix you up. What the flip do we pay tax to the government for, if that government isn't there to rescue us when we need to be rescued? :mad:

** = And I think a lot of them are vultures, so don't really like them. But if someone could fix up your house and then recover the costs from the builder, you could take care of the smaller things, like painting and get on with your life.

I think that, as part of the same law, builders should need to be licensed (just like drivers) and that irresponsible builders should either loose their license or get points put onto it. If a cowboy is going around taking cash and then not doing the work, they should be banned from building. And if they continue to operate, without a license, they should go to prison. This might not stop someone stealing your cash and hiding the cash behind their wife's skirts, but I suspect that if they faced going to prison for five years, the cash might magically appear again.

(There are also the type of builders who claim people need work that they don't need and they are also a danger to the public. While some of that might be a mistake, a lot of those guys need an instant ban.)

From the other side of the coin, there are builders, who go out of business and did not intend to rip customers off. So I think that this is where the procedure of bankruptcy needs to be changed, so that companies that fold are kept going until the work can get finished or handed onto someone else.

The main thing is that, people should not be left in the lurch while lawyers shuffle around bits of paper. There should be a fast response (to do things like make buildings watertight). And there should be a slightly slower response (to work out exactly how much*** of the rest of the work is covered).

*** = If, for example, you paid a builder to install a solid-gold toilet, I'd say that you could "put up with" having a normal toilet instead. But I think that this is an area where people would need to work out where the line is drawn.

(Again, I'm not sure if you would want to stick your head up for this, or if you just need some peace and quite for a while. But you seem eager to give Paul - and maybe people like him - a well deserved kick up the Khyber. And if that is the case, maybe you could use your name for this sort of push, get it called "Mike's Law" by the press and then be the "living proof" that this is needed.)

I don't know if any of these suggestions are useful, or desirable, but feel free to use any that you want and ignore any that you don't want.

(Obviously, I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Your mileage may vary. Contents may settle in transit. And...this poser may contain nuts. :rotfl: )

Big_Mac_TMMM

lisawaters wrote: »

This has to be Post Of The Year if only for dedication!

Of course it's still only January...

Thanks.

Cheers Mike. Good luck!

BTW: There is a CCed DIY SOS email coming your way.

Right. I need to get out of here and back to my geeky role playing games, before you lot get me hooked on Dancing on Ice. (I've already noticed Vanilla Ice on Dancing on Ice and posted it on Facebook. :eek: )

MatyMoo

Hi Big Mac I am going to have to go back and re-read you last mega post to take it all in but I am not sure facebook is needed - If you Google Paul Bridle Horsham it already brings you to MSE

Big_Mac_TMMM

MatyMoo wrote: »

Hi Big Mac I am going to have to go back and re-read you last mega post to take it all in but I am not sure facebook is needed - If you Google Paul Bridle Horsham it already brings you to MSE

If you think that was a mega-post, you should see how much I write about nerdy Dungeons & Dragons stuff (where I actually know something about it)! :rotfl:

Maybe Facebook isn't needed. Like I said, they were unsolicited ideas. But if Facebook was desirable, people could use "Like" and "Share" to pass it around. I was mainly thinking that not everyone uses Money Saving Expert and this could be a second way to go after the guy.

But then I suppose people can copy the URL of this thread and post it to Facebook too.

Nurseyjo_2

lisawaters wrote: »

They had 109 e-mails asking them to take the project on, so it would be nice if as many people thanked them as possible.
x

I will find time to write something tomorrow hopefully. I have had to think how to phrase it as I don't normally watch their programme and wouldn't necessarily watch it again, however, as you say, it is as important to say thank you as it is to ask.

It is a natural thing that society are quick to complain/tell a bad news story yet thanks/telling a good news story never happens so quickly. It always bemuses me that our family grapevine is red hot when someone is in trouble, but babies can be born without me even knowing the relative was pregnant!!

Princess_Sparkles

Hi All, esp. Mike.
Hope everyone is well & 2011 is going well for you. Thanks to Southern Belle for the email about the show. Sadly, due to a seemingly never ending run of rubbish luck, I didn't get to see it. So glad to see the back of 2010. Spell in hosp, then made redundant, am now ensconced in a Christmas temp job as a check out operator that sees me working stupid hours (& hence missing excellent DIY programmes that I've been waiting months to see.!)But a job's a job, right? Only for another 3 weeks though.
I used to believe in Karma & that there was a reason for everything, well whatever I did to deserve all this must have been awful.
Mike's story is evidence that there is good out there, and that's what I'm trying to remember as each day goes by.
I haven't had the time to catch up on the thread yet, so apologies if you've heard all this already Mike, but I hope you're still loving your house & it has made a huge difference to every area of your life. I loved the thread as it grew & reading it last summer was such fun - I guess not for you (sorry!), but I am so happy it had the result for you that it did. Onwards & upwards eh? Much Love. x:)