On the 18th January 2011 Grant Prior reporting on the web in the "Construction Enquirer"
www.constructionenquirer.com ...
Three of the UK’s most ruthless cowboy builders are facing jail sentences after being found guilty of conning up to 50 people across the South West of nearly £1m.Nicholas Harris, 45, Mark Dixon, 43, and Matthew Higgins, 33, were convicted of conspiracy to defraud at Bristol Crown Court.
The trio took deposits from their victims but never completed a single job.
The cowboys set up two firms – Construction Management Development Ltd and CMD Construction Services Ltd – to carry out the fraud.
Dixon, of Ash Lane, Down Hatherley; Harris, of Ash Path, Upton St Leonards and Higgins, of Nelson Street, Gloucester, had all denied conspiracy to defraud between April 2005 and October 2007.
Two other men, Leighton Docksey, 35, of Bathurst Road, Gloucester, and Lee Ireson, 30, of Gloucester Road, Cheltenham, were cleared of fraud charges.
The guilty men pretended that their firms were large UK-wide contractors and collected as much cash as possible up-front before stalling over the start of work.
A couple who fell victim to the Gloucester gang told the BBC they were “well and truly conned”.
Susan Giesbrecht and her husband Ben were left £20,000 out of pocket when CMD Services failed to build an extension to their home.
Mrs Giesbrecht, from Down Ampney, near Cirencester, said: “They sent along an incredibly plausible young man who got very friendly with us and seemed very amiable. We were completely taken in by him.
“I think both my husband and I would assume that because we were intelligent people, that we were unlikely to be duped by anybody. And we were well and truly conned by these people.”
Mr Giesbrecht said: “As I took more control of the project and started to put pressure on CMD to either do some work or to give us some money back, their reaction became increasingly hostile and aggressive.
“This included threats of legal action; I started receiving obscene nuisance phone calls and their e-mail correspondence became more and more aggressive.”
Businessman Mike Stanley, from Yate in South Gloucestershire, paid CMD Services £11,000 for an extension to his home.
After endless delays and excuses by the builders he told the company he was contacting the police.
He said: “Then I got a phone call back from this person who turned out to be Nick Harris saying that we should never threaten them with the police, if I do any more of this I’ll be breaking the contract and they therefore wouldn’t do any more work.
“I said ‘you’ve hardly done any work as it is’ and then things got pretty nasty on the telephone.
“I’m not that old but how they can go out and con pensioners out of their life savings I don’t know.
“It’s just despicable, I just hate them.”
He said he eventually had to spend another £11,000 to complete the work.
The three guilty men will face sentence on a date yet to be fixed.
... okay, so the point of putting this on my blog? ... RETROFIT FOR THE FUTURE is a programme of energy intervention works to meet the UK's target Carbon Reduction Commitment ~ now enshrined in law under the Climate Change Act 2008 ...
Retrofit for The Future is a massive programme lasting over the 40 years from 2010 until 2050 of various construction works that actually will involve some sort of energy intervention to around 26 MILLION existing domestic homes and some 3 MILLION other buildings recently added to the programme by the coalition ...
To meet this impressive programme the construction industry will actually need to undertake works to an enormous regular volume of work ... in broad terms, approx. 650,000 each and every year over the next 40 years! ... but, already the programme appears to have slipped ~ not much was done in 2010 except some important 'demonstration projects' to give vital information to the new Institute for Sustainability [IfS] and to assist the new SusCon Academy to gain experiences for their important role in the future. So, we now are down to 39 years which means more volume ... and each year there is a short-fall means greater and greater volumes of work needed ...
... but, haven't we overlooked the fact that the UK construction industry is on its knees and dragging along the bottom of one of the worse recessions in history ...
Unless the government ensures we have a competent and lawful construction industry that is full carded then the UK will be at risk of the cowboys and rogue traders simply moving into the lucrative market provided by an unregulated Retrofit for The Future programme !!! ... so, let's support a call for a proper assured competence system ~ no card = no job! ... simple as that!
Ed.
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