Family forced out of home by cowboy builder

A Preston family has been left homeless after a cowboy builder left their house uninhabitable.

Jewellers Guy and Katie Wakeling, who have children aged two and four, paid Dave Sutton of FSPD Limited £25,000 to add a dormer bedroom and bathroom to their bungalow home. They were told the work would take between four and six weeks.

But after work had started, Sutton went off with a bad back - and building inspectors told the couple that the house was in danger of collapse. Five months on, they are still unable to return home.

The building inspectors hadn't even been visiting the job. When they did they said the work was sub-standard, the materials used were cheap, there were no supporting joists and the windows were illegal," Mrs Wakeling tells the Lancashire Evening Post.

"We were told that if we had moved in, it could have fallen down around us. It was that bad."

The family is now living with relatives, and have little chance of getting their money back, as the firm has ceased trading and doesn't have any assets.

What makes it worse is that the couple had done all their homework.

"We checked the firm out with Companies House, we got several other quotes, saw their insurance certificate and we got a reference," says Mrs Wakeling.

"We didn't give him all the money up front, we just paid out as the job went along. Yet even after all that, we've been left in this situation, without a home to live in."

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The couple is now working with building inspectors Ball and Berry Ltd and their architect to try and come up with a new plan for making the property safe. Mrs Wakeling's brother has started a crowdfunding campaign to try and help out with costs, which has so far raised £610.

"The initial target of £20,000 is still currently very ambitious but who knows what will happen over the coming days," he says.

Cowboy builders are still far too common. And, as the Wakelings have discovered, even making staged payments can leave you seriously out of pocket if a job is abandoned part-way through.

One solution might be to take advantage of a new scheme, the Home Improvements Guarantee, through which payment for a job is placed in a holding account and given to the builder only when the client is happy.

Otherwise, your local Trading Standards office should have a list of approved tradesmen, as does the government-supported TrustMark scheme.