Cost of registering for quality mark revealed as project manager Stephen Walker is named anti-cowboy tsar.
Contractors can expect to pay up to £500 to obtain an anti-cowboy quality mark.

Chris Judge, quality and certification manager at Building Research Establishment Certification, which has won the contract to run the assessment scheme, said: “The scheme must cover its own costs and the figure we are working to is a maximum of £500.

“The DETR will fund the development costs where we work out the assessment methodology, but there will be costs processing and carrying out the assessments that contractors will have to pay.”

However, small businesses have reacted angrily to the quality mark fee. Raymond Acheson, contracts director of Northern Ireland-based housebuilder Euro Construction, which builds about 30 houses a year, said paying to be assessed was equivalent to taxation.

Acheson said: “This is just another unnecessary tax penalising competent small builders. There are enough mechanisms in place, like the CIS photocard scheme, to weed out cowboys. Why should we have to pay more to the government for being a reputable company?”

The announcement of the quality mark price tag comes after the news that Stephen Walker, of Surrey-based project manager Walker Associates, has been appointed to run the anti-cowboy pilot schemes in Birmingham and Somerset.

Tony Merricks, who was in charge of the DETR working group, said: “Stephen Walker will do an excellent job. I’ll be there to chair the panel and keep it moving in the right direction, but Stephen Walker will do the day-to-day running. I’ll just ensure it follows the right direction.”

Merricks said he would end his involvement with the anti-cowboy initiative once the pilot schemes were completed. “I was originally asked to produce a report and I’ve done that. It’s up to Nick [Raynsford] to decide which way he wants it to go,” he said.

It is understood that Merricks is disappointed that contractors refused to sign up to a compulsory registration scheme to outlaw cowboy builders.

One industry source said: “A lot of contractors felt Tony was too much in the corner of the consumers. He made his views on industry registration quite clear, and unfortunately they differed from most of the contractors’.”

  • Former construction minister Tony Baldry is scheduled to introduce a 10-minute rule bill that would require all work carried out by companies not signed up to the quality mark scheme to be inspected by local authority or approved inspectors.

    Baldry said his bill, which would form an extension to the 1984 Building Act, would build on the government’s existing proposals, although adding an element of statutory legislation.

    Merricks said he supported the bill, but added that he was not optimistic it would reach the statute book.