Trusted Payments app and the Approved Code, explained

What did the government announce on 28 August 2026?

On 28 August 2026 the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, announced a crackdown on cowboy builders. The GOV.UK press release sits alongside a separate clampdown on rogue bailiffs. Strip away the press-release language and there are two concrete things in it for anyone who works on people's homes.

The first is the Trusted Payments app: an escrow-style payments app for home improvement work. The customer pays in, the money is held, and it is released to the trade as stages of the job are done. GOV.UK's notes to editors say the app goes live in the week beginning 31 August 2026, and that more than 100,000 traders will be able to access it before the end of September.

The second is a new voluntary Approved Code for the home improvement sector, developed by the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) and the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman (FHIO). It sets standards on customer service, transparency and dispute resolution. GOV.UK says the first businesses are due on by the end of September, and the code is due to be fully live in December 2026.

Neither is compulsory. Nobody is going to make you sign up to either scheme. This is not a new law. But your customers watch the same news you do, and the point of the announcement is to change what homeowners expect when they hand money to a trade.

• 28 August 2026: GOV.UK publishes the announcement.
• Week beginning 31 August 2026: Trusted Payments app goes live.
• Before the end of September 2026: government says more than 100,000 traders can access the app; first Approved Code businesses due on.
• December 2026: Approved Code fully live.

The government's own figures behind the crackdown

The figures in the press release are the government's own, not Traddie's. GOV.UK says more than one in four UK adults who had home improvement work done in the last 18 months ran into problems with it. Of those, more than one in three (37%) faced extra costs, losing £750 on average. Those numbers come from Which? and Toynbee Hall, Built to fail. Across home and garden maintenance as a whole, the government puts the money lost in 2024 at £10.3 billion, from the Consumer Detriment Survey 2024.

The honest majority of the trade pays for that in a different currency: trust. Every rogue job makes the next customer warier about deposits, warier about paying on time, and keener on anything with the word "protected" in it. That is the gap both halves of this announcement are built to fill.

How the Trusted Payments app actually works

Trusted Payments is a private company, not a government department, though it launches with the government's endorsement. Find it at trustedpayments.uk. Its founding team previously built Resolver, the consumer complaints service, and JamDoughnut. That background tells you the DNA: this is a consumer protection product first.

The money flow works like this. The customer pays in by debit card, credit card or Open Banking. Payments are processed by Stripe, which is FCA-authorised. The money is released in stages as milestones on the job are completed. Where a retention is held back, Trusted Payments says it sits in an independent trust account held by the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman. Trusted Payments itself says it has no access to, and no control over, client funds at any point. It also says it is not a bank, is not FCA-authorised, and does not hold client money.

On fees: Trusted Payments does not add a transaction fee of its own. Stripe's processing costs are passed to the trade at cost. The company makes its money on insurance-backed warranties sold alongside the job. Its FAQ describes a one-year insurance-backed warranty. Elsewhere on the same site it also describes a 24-month completion warranty covering a trader going bust, disappearing or walking off. Warranties are underwritten by an FCA-authorised insurer. Trusted Payments is not the insurer.

If a dispute comes up, Trusted Payments says it raises the case with the independent ombudsman rather than deciding it in the app, and the warranty pays out if the trade fails to put things right within the dispute period.

Who can join Trusted Payments?

This is the bit most of the coverage missed. Trusted Payments does not take any trader who downloads the app. To take a job through it, you need to be a vetted member of one of its partner schemes: TrustMark, Buy With Confidence, BALI or Book a Builder.

If you are not in one of those schemes, you cannot take a Trusted Payments job at all, no matter how good your work is. And if a customer turns up having heard about the app on the news, membership is suddenly a sales question, not a paperwork question.

Joining any of those schemes involves vetting and takes time, so if you want to be able to say yes to those customers, the application is worth starting before the demand arrives rather than after.

What is the Approved Code for home improvement?

The Approved Code is the quieter half of the announcement, but it is the one that will probably shape the sector for longer. It is voluntary, developed by CTSI and the FHIO, and businesses that sign up commit to standards in three areas: customer service, how transparent they are with customers, and how they handle disputes.

The timeline is slower than the app. GOV.UK says the first businesses are due to be operating under the code by the end of September 2026, with the code fully live in December 2026. Judith Turner, deputy chief ombudsman at the FHIO, called it a "gold standard" in the same press release, delivered by FHIO in partnership with CTSI.

A voluntary code only bites if customers start looking for it. That is not guaranteed. But codes like this tend to end up in consumer advice articles, comparison checklists and insurance small print, and once "is your builder signed up to the Approved Code?" appears on a Which? checklist, voluntary starts feeling less voluntary.

How do Trusted Payments and Approved Code disputes work?

Both routes, a Trusted Payments dispute and an Approved Code complaint, end up at the same place: the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman, the body behind the FHIO. The process it runs is worth understanding now, because it is the process your next serious disagreement with a customer may go through.

First, the customer has to complete your own in-house complaints procedure. They can only escalate to the ombudsman once that procedure ends in a deadlock letter, or once three months have passed since the complaint. Then comes conciliation, where the ombudsman tries to broker an agreement. If that fails, it moves to adjudication: an independent decision made on the evidence, which can include sending an independent inspector to look at the installation. If the customer accepts the adjudication, it is binding on the business.

Every stage of that is decided on documents. Dated photos, a written quote, a record of what was agreed and when, a stage the customer signed off. The trade that can produce those tends to be fine. The trade whose whole case is "we shook on it" is the one the process was designed to catch.

What does escrow mean for trade cash flow?

The uncomfortable part of an escrow scheme is not the protection. It is the cash flow. If a customer pays into Trusted Payments instead of paying you a deposit, the money for materials sits in a held account until the first milestone is agreed done. On a job where you front the materials, that gap is yours to finance.

It lands hardest on the smallest firms. Sole traders and one-van outfits rely on deposits to buy materials. Long jobs such as kitchens, extensions and full rewires only pay out at the stages written into the agreement, so every stage you want paying for has to be in the quote before you start. High-material trades, roofers, kitchen and bathroom fitters and similar, carry the biggest outlay for the longest time. A trade with no written quote, no job record and no invoice trail has no way to prove a milestone is finished at all.

None of that is mandatory today, and plenty of customers will carry on paying by bank transfer like they always have. But if staged, protected payment becomes what homeowners expect, the trades that already quote in stages and keep records will barely notice the change. The ones that run on a handshake and a deposit will. Builders already quoting in stages are the closest to ready.

Do cooling-off rules still apply under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013?

None of this replaces the law that already applies to home improvement work. One piece of it becomes much more visible once an ombudsman is reading the file: the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.

If you agree a contract away from your business premises, which for most trades means at the customer's kitchen table, or at a distance, over the phone or by email, the customer normally has a 14-day cancellation right. For off-premises contracts, that right does not apply where the payment is £42 or less (regulations 7(4) and 27(3)). Distance contracts do not get that low-value carve-out. The cancellation notice is pre-contract information: you have to give it before the contract is made, which in practice means it travels with the quote, not after the customer has accepted.

Get that wrong and the consequences are severe. Miss the notice and the 14-day window can extend by up to 12 months. Start work inside the cancellation window without the customer's express request and they can cancel without paying for what you have done.

That has been the law since June 2014. What changes now is who is checking. A cancellation notice that never went out is exactly the kind of thing an adjudication on documents surfaces in minutes.

What should trades do before the end of September 2026?

You do not need to sign up to anything this week. You do need to be ready for the questions. The sensible list looks like this.

• If you want access to Trusted Payments jobs, check whether you are already a member of TrustMark, Buy With Confidence, BALI or Book a Builder, and start the application if not.
• Quote in writing, every time, even for small jobs. A verbal agreement cannot be adjudicated in your favour.
• On longer jobs, write the payment stages into the quote before you start. Under escrow, a stage that is not written down is a stage you cannot get released.
• Send the cooling-off notice with the quote for any contract agreed in the customer's home or remotely, not after acceptance.
• Keep dated photos as you go, and get something in writing when a stage is finished, even if it is just a confirmed message.
• Keep the invoice trail clean: what was billed, what was paid, what is outstanding. Automatic payment reminders help when a stage has been released but the customer still has not paid the rest.

Where Traddie fits

Most of that list is what Traddie already does: written quotes with payment schedules, invoices with a proper paper trail, job records with photos and messages in one place, and automatic chasing when an invoice goes overdue. If the industry is moving to a world where the paperwork decides who gets paid, the cheapest insurance is having the paperwork happen automatically.

We are also building specifically for this announcement, starting with a job event log and a pre-start pack that puts the quote, terms and cancellation notice in one dated bundle. More on that as it ships. See our editorial policy for how we source and update this kind of post.

What is still unknown

It is early. The app was announced days before its launch week, the Approved Code is months from being fully live, and the fine detail of both will only become clear once real jobs run through them. Trusted Payments has no public API and no published partner programme yet, so how it connects to the tools trades already use is an open question.

The industry is not uniformly delighted either. Coverage in Building reported the National Federation of Builders offering cautious support while warning against "licensing by the back door", and pushing its own Digital Building Passport as an alternative. Expect plenty more argument in the trade press before December.

We will keep this post updated as the schemes go live. If any of the dates or details above change, the version on this page is the current one.