This week the government announced a proper clampdown on “cowboy builders.” From September, a new government-backed Approved Code— delivered by the Furniture & Home Improvement Ombudsman with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute — will help people find trusted traders who meet real standards on service, transparency and dispute resolution. A new Trusted Payments system will let homeowners hold their money back and release it as the work actually gets done.
It's genuinely good news, and the numbers behind it are grim: more than one in four UK adults who had home-improvement work done in the last 18 months ran into problems, and of those, more than a third faced extra costs — losing £750 on average. In 2024, people lost over £10.3 billionon home and garden maintenance to shoddy work, overcharging and unfair practices. Anyone who's had a job abandoned halfway through, or watched a deposit vanish, knows the stress behind those figures.
But here's the thing every new-build owner should understand: this scheme isn't about the company that built your house.
The crackdown covers the home-improvement trade — the people you hire for an extension, a new kitchen, a re-wire. Buying a new-build home from a developer is a completely separate world, with its own rules.
New-build does have protections, and it's only fair to say so. The New Homes Quality Code and the New Homes Ombudsmannow set standards for how developers should treat buyers and handle complaints, and warranties like NHBC's Buildmark sit behind the build. The Code is a real step forward, and the best builders take genuine pride in their work and deserve credit for it.
So it isn't that new-build buyers have nothing. It's that, in the one area that matters most before you commit hundreds of thousands of pounds — judging whether a builder is actually any good — the industry still largely marks its own homework.
Think about how you weigh up a builder today. The headline signal is the star rating— “5-star housebuilder,” proudly on the hoardings. But that rating comes from a customer-satisfaction survey run by the builders' own trade body. The industry sets the questions, runs the survey, and awards itself the stars. Imagine if restaurants were rated only by a survey the restaurants themselves commissioned — you'd take those stars with a fair pinch of salt.
Then, when something goes wrong, your first port of call is the builder's owncomplaints process. The warranty bodies were established by, and are funded by, the industry. Independent redress exists, but you generally have to exhaust the builder's own process to reach it.
None of this makes builders villains — most are decent, and plenty go above and beyond. But it does mean the person with the least power in the transaction, the buyer, is largely reliant on the industry's own account of how good the industry is. You can read a thousand independent reviews before buying a £10 gadget. For the biggest purchase of your life, you're mostly handed a glossy brochure and a star rating the industry gave itself.
The home-improvement crackdown works because it puts independent standards and independentredress between the trader and the customer. New-build buyers deserve that same principle applied properly: not the industry grading itself, but a transparent, honest picture from the people who've actually lived it.
That means reviews that are verified(so they're real residents, not fakes, rivals or the builder posting about themselves), anonymous (so people can be honest without fear), and independent(no builder funding, no ads) — covering the whole journey, not just moving-in day, and giving the builder a fair right of reply. The good builders have nothing to fear from that; it's how they finally get the credit they've earned. And the ones cutting corners can no longer hide behind a rating they marked themselves.
That's the gap we're trying to close. The government is right that fairness means independence. New-build buyers should get it too.
The good and the bad. Verified, anonymous, and free — the independent picture buyers actually need.
Review your builderComment and general information, not legal advice. The government measures announced in August 2026 relate to the home-improvement/trades sector; new-build homes are covered separately by the New Homes Quality Code, the New Homes Ombudsman and your warranty provider. Which code and scheme apply to your home depend on your builder's registration and your paperwork.