If you’ve had a roofer round to quote on a re-roof off the High Road in Epping this summer, chances are you’ve been asked for a deposit before a single tile’s gone up. TrustMark, the government’s own quality scheme, has just teamed up with a firm called Trusted Payments to change that, tying payments to actual project milestones instead of handing money over up front.
For customers in Loughton and Theydon Bois that means quotes, contracts and staged payments all managed through one system, with a dispute resolution route built in if a job goes wrong. For us it’s not really news — we’ve never taken the full amount before the felt’s on and the battens are struck out, and we won’t ask for the balance until the ridge tiles are bedded and the guttering’s run off. But it does mean homeowners finally get a proper yardstick for spotting who’s serious.
What a payment scheme won’t do is check the technical detail, and that’s where most of the trouble starts on an older Epping roof. We’re still called out to houses round Ongar and North Weald where a previous job’s failed because the felt laps were under the 100mm you need in our weather, the batten gauge was guessed rather than set out from the ridge down, or there’s no dry verge system at all — just a bit of mortar bedding the tiles that’ll be cracked and gone inside two winters.
Ask any roofer quoting you for their Competent Person scheme number, and ask what lead they’re using around chimneys and valleys. Code 4 is the minimum we’d put on most stacks, because Code 3 simply doesn’t hold up long term. And ask to see a finished job with the scaffold still up, not just photos taken after everyone’s packed away.
We’re glad to see the rogue traders getting squeezed a bit harder. If you’ve got a roof anywhere around Epping that needs a straight answer rather than a hard sell, give All Roofing and Guttering a call or have a look at what we do at allroof.co.uk/.
