The scheme announced as a government move against cowboy builders is, in mechanical terms, an escrow account with an ombudsman attached. It went live on 1 September.
The detail that matters most to a small trade business is not the branding. It is that a customer’s money sits somewhere neither party can unilaterally take it from, and that the same arrangement stops a customer from having work done without paying for it.
How the Money Actually Moves
The Trusted Payments app requests a “completion payment” of 10% at the start of the job, which is held in escrow until the project is finished and the consumer has signed it off.
The trader can request further funding to buy materials, and subsequent payments are released against agreed milestones. That is the part that answers the question tradespeople asked first, which was what protects them from customers who do not pay. Under this structure the trader simply does not proceed to the next stage until the milestone is settled.
So the protection runs in both directions, which is unusual. Most consumer-protection schemes in this sector protect only the consumer, and are correspondingly unpopular with the trades expected to fund them.
The 10% figure is doing something specific too. A conventional deposit is money the customer has already surrendered, and the argument after a dispute is about getting it back. Holding the final tenth instead reverses the leverage: the sum in play is money the trader has not yet received, and the trader is the party motivated to bring the job to a signed-off conclusion in order to release it. That is a smaller intervention than regulating the trade, and it changes who is chasing whom at the end of a project.
Who Pays, and How Much
The consumer pays, not the trader. The fee is £45 or £85 depending on the job, or £25 for work up to £2,500, and it can be built into the quote the customer receives.
Included is £20,000 of insurance cover, underwritten by an A-rated insurer. The cover extends further than might be expected: scams, a trader walking off the job, a trader ceasing to trade, repair costs and consequential damage.
For a small builder that combination is commercially significant. A quote that carries visible payment protection and a £20,000 backstop is easier to win against an unregistered competitor quoting slightly less, particularly for the kind of job where the customer’s main fear is being left with a half-finished kitchen.
It Is a Private Service, Not a Government One
This is the point most likely to be lost in the coverage. Trusted Payments is a private business, independent of government, working in partnership with TrustMark, the UK’s government-endorsed quality scheme for work in and around the home.
The government has endorsed it. The government does not run it, and will not have access to the data.
That distinction matters because of what builders and consumers immediately assumed. The reaction to the announcement included suspicion that the aim was to stop cash payments, end self-employment or collect more tax. Those concerns are addressed by the structure rather than by reassurance: a privately operated escrow service with no government data access is not a tax-collection mechanism.
The Route In Runs Through TrustMark
Traders registered with TrustMark must meet its standards on quality of work and customer service and commit to its Code of Conduct. Registered traders can then sign up to Trusted Payments.
Scale is arriving quickly. BookaBuilderUK and two Trading Standards schemes are being added, which is expected to take the pool to around 140,000 traders by October 2026.
Reaching that number inside two months only works because it is an aggregation of existing memberships rather than a fresh sign-up drive. The traders concerned have already been vetted by TrustMark or a Trading Standards scheme; what is new is the payment rail bolted on top. That makes the growth figure less impressive as evidence of adoption than it first appears, and more reliable as evidence that the scheme will actually have participants.
Traders using the app can also join the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman Approved Code Scheme, run in partnership with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute.
Disputes Go to an Ombudsman, Not a Court
If something goes wrong the FHIO steps in. For a trader with a payment problem the ombudsman is available at any stage. For a consumer, a dispute must have been open with the trader for 45 days first, and the ombudsman can intervene more than once.
Kevin Grix, chief executive and chief ombudsman of The Ombuds Group, described the combination of the new Chartered Trading Standards Institute approved code for home improvements and the Trusted Payments partnership as “a major step forward”.
The practical case for ombudsman routes rather than legal ones is straightforward. Court action over a disputed extension is expensive, slow and stressful, and for most households the sums involved do not justify it. A £6,000 dispute that cannot realistically be litigated is a £6,000 dispute the trader effectively wins by attrition, whoever is right.
The Voluntary Problem
The obvious objection is the one industry representatives have already made: the scheme is voluntary.
A trader intending to take deposits and disappear will not register for an escrow service that withholds the money until the customer is satisfied. The scheme therefore cannot deter the people it is named after. What it can do is give honest traders a way to signal that they are honest, which is a different and more modest claim.
There is also a fair concern about administration. Legitimate firms already carrying TrustMark registration, insurance and accreditation costs are being offered another layer, and for a two-person operation each additional process has a real time cost.
The counter is that this particular layer is the one that gets paid for by someone else. Registration costs the trader time rather than money, and the fee falls to the customer. Compared with the accreditations already required to reach this point, that is an unusually cheap addition, which is probably why industry objections have focused on whether it will work rather than on what it costs.
What It Is Worth
Government figures put consumer losses connected with home and garden maintenance at more than £10bn in 2024, with more than a quarter of people who undertook home improvements in the past 18 months reporting problems.
Against that, an escrow app is a narrow instrument. It addresses the specific failure of money leaving the customer before work is completed, which is one mechanism of loss among several, and it does nothing about poor workmanship by a trader who stays to the end. For that, the ombudsman route rather than the escrow is the relevant part of the package.
For small trade businesses the calculation is nonetheless favourable, because the cost sits with the customer and the credential is free to display. In a sector where most small traders earn less than the wage they must pay staff, anything that helps win work against an unregistered competitor without adding cost is worth the registration. And in a market where the smallest housebuilders sell ten homes a site a year, the smallest operators are precisely the ones with least ability to absorb a customer dispute.
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