The government has unveiled a crackdown on cowboy builders centred on a Trusted Payments app going live next week and an Approved Code expected to cover more than 100,000 traders by the end of September.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham said rogue tradespeople "leave families with months of stress" as well as unfinished work. The scale of the problem is significant: people lost more than £10.3 billion on home and garden maintenance in 2024 due to losses, overpriced costs or unfair practices, according to figures published alongside the government's announcement. Citizens Advice data cited by the government shows more than one in four UK adults who carried out home improvements in the past 18 months experienced problems, with over a third of those affected facing extra costs - losing an average of £750 each.
The Approved Code, developed with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute and the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman, is not expected to be fully live until December. Traders signing up will need to meet standards covering customer service, transparency and dispute resolution. The full qualifying criteria have not yet been published.
The standards are unconfirmed, but the government has previous form on how these schemes treat insurance, and the pattern is consistent.
A coalition-era reform of self-check building schemes explicitly required tradespeople to have "a financial safety net in place such as a guarantee or insurance" before being treated as approved. That was not a suggestion - it was a qualifying condition. A separately launched trusted-trader verification platform, Compare Builders, already lists insurance confirmed directly with insurers as one of its core checks alongside Companies House registration and VAT status.
The Approved Code has not confirmed it will use the same template. But both the historical precedent and the current commercial practice point in the same direction: insurance verification as a gating mechanism, not a supplementary credential.
For brokers with builder, contractor and tradesperson clients, the advisory prompt does not depend on waiting for the Approved Code's final detail. Two risks are already live.
The first is immediate. Existing trusted-trader platforms, including Compare Builders, are operating right now with insurance verification as a listed checkpoint. A client without adequate public liability cover, or whose policy has lapsed or cannot be confirmed directly with the insurer, is already at risk of exclusion from platforms where new work is being sourced today.
The second is forward-looking. If the Approved Code follows the same template as the coalition-era scheme and existing commercial platforms - and the pattern of evidence strongly suggests it will - then clients without verifiable cover will be locked out of the government's own scheme when it launches in full this autumn.
Adequate public liability cover, with a policy that is current and verifiable, is the baseline. Brokers who check their tradesperson clients' coverage status now - before the Approved Code publishes its criteria and before clients begin asking why they have been excluded from a scheme they expected to qualify for - are having the conversation at the right moment rather than the wrong one.
