Cowboy Clients,Customers from Hell

Leif

robert2011 wrote: »

Is the suffering of builders any less than clients ? TV shows ,Newspapers paint a very bad image of British builders. This is not good for the industry or the UK economy, the cause of this problem is: apart from corgi reg gas heating engineers, you do not need any qualifications to be a plumber,joiner,electrician,brickie Unbeliavable but TRUE !
Where all this scaremongering is taking us Folks is soon all trades must pass competence tests to be credited with a trade card, like the plumbers did in 1996 for the gas cert.

I am in favour of this ! but with money in short supply , who will be able to afford £80 call out charge for a joiner and around £50 p hour for his time ?

What you say about regulation makes sense.

Obviously you are right that there are rogue customers, and that is rarely reported. Being in business is not always easy. In good times the profits can be great, but there is usually risk, and the potential losses can be significant. For example most restaurants fail. I think you make a good point that watchdogs do not report on rogue customers. One reason why rogue traders perhaps make a better story is that many prey on the weak, elderly and vulnerable.

When my late mother was alive I was taken aback by how many people went out of the way to take her for a ride. It was not hard since she was confined to a wheel chair, and her sight was not good. There was the gardening company who were paid £100, and they emptied her garden of strawberry plants and eryngiums, but left dandelions and other weeds. I saw in the paper their advert which referred to "plants for sale" and assume many were stolen from elderly clients. Then there was the electric scooter company who used hard sell tactics. And when the wheels packed in, they refused to provide warranty support. Fortunately the distributor stopped supplying them, but Trading Standards were no use. Fortunately her plumber and builder were honest people charging a fair rate i.e. not low. She had visiting nurses in the evening, and one stole a pair of £200 binoculars. Theft by nursing staff is not rare, though it is of course a tiny minority, most being honest. I think the issues my mother had were in part due to unregulated cowboys in an area with high unemployment.

I suspect the internet might help the consumer, as we can now search by name to see if a builder has a poor reputation. It does not help builders check clients though.

I think jillytb makes a good point. A customer will quickly get a bad credit rating if they mess about, where builders can mess customers about and it is hard to do much about it unless it is blatantly illegal. That said, how many builders do credit checks? And tradesmen tend to ask for 50% payment up front, so even if they do a weeks work, the worst they suffer is loss of payment for labour, whereas a customer might be left without a bathroom for a month, or a damaged bathroom costing a fortune to repair.

I think it is a valid point that "customer diddled by workman" is a more common story than "workman diddled by customer".

marlasinger

kmmr wrote: »

I think someone the other day said the builders had damaged a drain cover, and they were going to fix it next week, so they were going to hold back all payments until it was resolved. Some huge out of proportion amount, with a builder who was otherwise doing an ok job.

I did think that perhaps this was a bit out of proportion!

I think this is referring to my post. I suggest you re-read the thread, and you will find that other aspects of the job were not ok as you say. There were other issues, which actually resulted in the builder firing the fellow doing the work (the one who broke the drain cover).