Andy Burnham's builder scheme and the Trusted Payments app: what it means for homeowners

Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has thrown his weight behind two linked ideas aimed at the UK's rogue builder problem. The first is the Approved Code scheme — a standards framework, developed with the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman and the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, that builders and home-improvement firms can sign up to and be held against. The second is the Trusted Payments app — an escrow-style payment service that changes how money moves between you and your builder.

The problem being tackled is huge. Every year, UK homeowners lose hundreds of millions of pounds to builders who take deposits and vanish, start work and never finish, or do work so poor it has to be ripped out and redone. Trading Standards services receive tens of thousands of complaints about home improvement work annually, and the true figure is far higher because many people never report it.

The scheme's logic is simple: cowboys thrive on two things — no accountability and cash up front. Take away both, and the business model collapses.

Trusted Payments is built around escrow — a neutral holding account. Here is the basic flow:

1. You and the builder agree a written quote with defined stages of work.
2. Instead of paying a deposit to the builder, you pay the agreed amount into the secure holding account.
3. The builder can see the money is there, so they can start with confidence — but they cannot touch it yet.
4. As each stage of the job is completed and you confirm you are happy, that stage's payment is released.
5. If something goes wrong, the unreleased money stays protected while the dispute is resolved.

This flips the usual power balance. Today, once you have handed over a big deposit, you are chasing the builder. With escrow, the builder is motivated to finish each stage properly because that is when they get paid.