Cowboy Traders Charged Me £5k To Fix My Roof – How Can I Get Justice From The Con Men?

Dear Rocio,

How do we take the fight back to crooks, con men and cowboy builders?
Name and address supplied.

Rocio says: When local traders knocked on Mr Smith’s (not his real name) door offering to paint the wooden canopy on his roof, he accepted. After all, half of the paintwork had come off and it needed a once-over.

Unexpected – but so far, so convenient. Yet when the trader, once on the roof, started banging on it, Mr Smith and his wife were concerned. The trader had, Mr Smith believes, deliberately damaged the roof so he could intimidate Mr Smith into paying much more for him to fix it.

The job, the trader said, would now cost more than £5,000. In the end, Mr Smith, who is in his seventies, paid the trader and his two friends – who by now were crowding around him intimidatingly – hundreds of pounds just to go away.

On the front line investigating these crimes are trading standards – a network of local teams across the country with powers to take enforcement action against businesses that break the law.

But when Mr Smith reported this matter to his local trading standards team in Barnet, he claimed they “weren’t interested”.

Barnet Council told Which?: “While we can’t comment on individual cases, our trading standards team is fully committed to ensuring that consumers are protected and that rogue and illegal traders face consequences.”

I relay this story because I know many readers will have had an experience similar to Mr Smith’s.

Home renovations that turn into nightmares. Patios that crumble after a few weeks. Shoddy plumbing work. Extensions with poor insulation. The perpetrators often vanish with your money in tow.

It’s not just dodgy building work where crooks and con men are thriving, either. Take a walk down your local high street and you’ll find ample evidence of criminal gangs taking over shops, selling illegal and counterfeit products, like cheap cigarettes and dodgy vapes.

Beauty procedures, like Brazilian butt lifts or lip fillers, have soared in popularity, but so too has the number of backstreet ‘surgeries’ offering the service, unlicensed, sometimes in places like public toilets.

The government has encouragingly recently pledged to clamp down on the latter. But these measures will only work in practice if the teams carrying out the enforcement are properly equipped.

As a Which? Freedom of Information request to all 187 trading standards teams in England, Scotland and Wales has found, many aren’t.

Large London boroughs have fewer than one member of staff per 100,000 people. A fifth of local authorities haven’t carried out a single criminal prosecution in the financial year 2023-24.

Many serious crimes, like scams and counterfeit products coming into the country and appearing on our high streets, go uninvestigated because local authorities don’t have the resources.

It can fuel a sense of a country that isn’t working for citizens and businesses that want to play by the rules. It is a depressing thought that brazen criminal gangs appear to operate knowing the repercussions for their actions will be close to zero.

Meanwhile, the systems designed to investigate these activities that provide an effective deterrent and help people get justice have effectively collapsed.

It needn’t be this way. With more effective data sharing, reallocation of expertise and resources in areas they’re most needed, greater accountability and stronger collaboration at a regional and national level, trading standards can operate much more effectively.

If the government is serious about tackling crime and supporting responsible consumers and businesses, ministers need to get a grip on the criminals and rogue traders destroying lives by reforming our trading standards.

Rocio Concha is the director of policy and advocacy at which.co.uk. To have your question featured on this page, email business@theipaper.com