Why do builders get such a bad rep? What makes us trust some trades people and not others?

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing Chris's problems with builders. Chris, tell us

about your builders. Well, so we're having our porch sort of rebuilt at the moment and it's a fairly small space and one critical element of a porch is that you can get in and out via a door and there have been substantial problems with the door so it's like a bespoke door fitted for our space and we picked it from a range of all kinds of different doors and when it turned up the hinge and the lock were on the wrong side of the door so that obviously wasn't going to work and then they reordered it and it turned up and it didn't pass quality assurance so they had to send it back again and then the third time it was supposed to turn up it was problematic and then there were issues to do with the flooring and so on and so forth. It's a small, fairly small building project but a number of issues with it and it got me thinking, you know, whenever you talk to anybody about building projects, virtually never have I, you know, has somebody been having an extension done or something and you say how's it going and they say swimmingly actually, it got done ahead of time and everything went perfectly. Always people mention some sort of snag, some problem with the builders and it made me start thinking why are builders not very reliable, why is there this phenomenon in this country of the cowboy builder and what is it about building that that means that's able to exist and these companies don't sort of just instantly go out of business.

Okay, yeah, no, that's good. There's all sorts of things I can, yeah, I can see us going on to all sorts of things here. Yeah, basically we're going to slug off builders for the next 20 minutes,

wasn't it? Yeah, well not just builders, I mean tradesmen of all kinds. So let's, yeah. I've got my own, I mean we've just in the last year had two situations, one with the, we wanted someone to sort out the gutters and get moss off the roof and they seemed quite plausible, you know, they came around and they did such a bad job. The gutter fell off after they'd gone and there was no getting hold of them. The rendering that they put on the chimney breast was really sloppy. Someone, we had to get someone else in to come take it all off and put it back again in a nice way and, you know, and then we had this issue with our downstairs toilet and the people who came originally, you know, it's what started out as replacing the macerator. It ended up being, you know, pulling the wall out and having to replace tubes and now the bath doesn't drain properly downstairs. It's just. Was it clogged with moss? It wasn't taken well and I mean the thing, there's that, I don't know if you guys are aware of the Flanders and Swans song, The Gasman Cometh, it's highly recommended. It's a two minute long comic song, absolutely brilliant. You know, kind of just basically the gas man comes and then the gas man takes the skirting boards off so he has to call the carpenter and then the carpenter goes through a electricity wire and then he has to, you know, and that, you know, that was, you know, must have been 40, 50 years ago that they wrote that and it's still true today, you know. It is just every single time you have any kind of, you know, tradesman in, there's a really high probability that it's going to go wrong. Well, that doesn't happen with, you know, green grocers. It doesn't happen with picture framers. Why does it always happen with, you know, tradesmen? That's what

we want to talk about. Before we seek to answer that question, apparently within the trades there's a hierarchy as well and right at the bottom apparently are plumbers. Oh, okay. As you would

have experienced. Well, it's interesting because I've got some data here about, according to the, well, according to the Federation of Master Builders, who are keen in fact to try and obviously to stamp out cowboy builders. Cowboyism. They, 55% of people have had a bad experience with a road builder, which seems to me low. The other 45% must have never had building work done. But which, according to a which survey, there's really strong disparity between how trusted tradespeople are. So at the very top are electricians. I was going to say electricians. Yeah, 80% trusted. Right at the bottom, roofers, 48% trusted. So that's a significant difference. I don't know exactly how they're measuring this, but, and then, you know, so at the top you've got electricians, central heating guys, plumbers, carpenters. At the bottom it's roofers, drain and sewer services, builders, and kitchen fitters. If Peter were here, he would tell you about his experience with kitchen fitters who fit everything in, who put everything into his new kitchen wonky. You know, there were gaps between things where there shouldn't have been gaps. So yeah. So I think what we want to do is, is this just random? Is it just, you know, randomly these trades happen to have got cultures which are sloppy or highly professional? Or are there features, fundamental features of those kinds of trades that mean that actually it makes sense that we get rogue traders?

Certainly from the list that you read out there, there's some stuff that leaps to mind immediately to do really with knowledge, experience and qualifications and training, expertise, essentially. But anyway, before we sort of go into that, let's ask, answer the question, because also I think one of the things we mentioned in our preparation discussions for this was Greengrocers. You don't get, you don't get Cowboy Greengrocers, you don't get Cowboy Accountants,

you don't get Cowboy Lawyers. Well, well, I mean, but there are, there are trades that are respected and generally trusted and there are ones that are not. So let's answer this then. So

Chris, have a crack at it. Why do we get Cowboy Builders? Right. Well, I mean, I've got a number

of factors that I think are important. So if you, like, I was thinking, okay, so you, I mean, you were talking a little bit about kind of levels of qualification. But I don't think, I don't think it's necessarily that issue. I think one of the factors, because if you look at sort of comparable trades that people of a similar kind of educational background might go into, like something like, you know, being a Greengrocer or, you know, hairdressing, something like that. Those, those are trades that you, that you would have a sort of faith in. And I was thinking about, okay, I was like making a list of a bunch of trades. And I think that the key thing seemed to be the regularity with which you, you engage them. So a hairdresser, you go back to, you know, a Greengrocer on a weekly basis, you might go and do your shopping there. And on each occasion, the transaction you're making is relatively small. And, you know, with builders, you might only have builders in every five or 10 years or something like that. And it's a big transaction. And so I think there's something, something about that, that it is, that they're not going to have to come back and look you in the face again. But so they've only got one interaction with you, and they're getting a large amount of money for it. And it probably makes sense to have a strategy, or at least it encourages a strategy of not being, not being very good, but fooling the person and taking the big pot of money. So that's one, one factor.

Yes, it's harder to, it's harder to track reputation because of the small numbers of interactions. Yeah. And I think the, so there's that, there's those things, traders who come to you are going to be harder to track than someone who's got a shop in the high street. And actually, you know, when you think about trades in the high street, the trade, which is traditionally regarded as the dodgiest, which would be a secondhand car salesman, you know, notably has a very low setup cost, typically, you know, has a hut in a parking lot, you know, and so you actually, that begins to make sense. You think, well, the more expensive your footprint is, you know, the more you are going to have to rely on doing a good job. I think there's something else,

I think, I think we're making good headway in this already. And there's another thing, which I'm sure you've already thought of, but it's knowledge of the product or service that you're receiving. So let's say you're going to a greengrocer, you're buying some apples and stuff, and also the immediacy of what you're getting. So most people know a bad apple when they see one, as soon as I saw Nick, I knew. But as soon as you see the bad fruit, you know immediately, and you either don't buy it, or you just, if you've already bought it, you go somewhere else.

We're evolved to spot that.

Yeah, right. Whereas if it's something like building, we actually don't really know what it is necessarily. And we trust that these people know what they're doing. And also, it's more invasive, it's usually in our home place, it's a higher cost.

So, and I think, you know, one of the things that I got a bit of an insight into when Nick was talking about the hierarchy within the trades themselves, is that at the top of that were electricians and central heat, central heating people, both of those things carry an element of danger to them. So, you know, if your electrics gets wired up wrong, or your gas gets, you know, sort of connected up wrong, they can have lethal consequences, as can poor building work. But generally, you know, it's much easier to create lethal effect in those two areas. And so they're highly certified. But, you know, also, the consequences of getting it wrong is not just, you know, a roof leaks, it's somebody dies, and you'll be prosecuted. So I think that's important. And when you were saying about, you know, we don't know much about building generally, you know, sort of middle class academic types, you know, haven't spent time working out how to plaster a wall or something. So it's unknown to us. But I think you could say the same of the medical profession, for example, most people, we take their word for it. But again, there's that issue of significant consequence of the advice, the service being wrong. And so there is some

regulation process, you know, lots of barriers to entry. That's right. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, just going back to this thing about the unknown, going back to what we find in the high street. So your example of a car dealership, or even let's say a mechanic, a garage, similarly, we're dealing with stuff we don't really know about, we kind of have to trust the people. Yeah, this is this. So

it? Is that it? I mean, we've got five minutes to go. I was gonna I was gonna speak in defense of builders. Yeah, that's right. And say, well, you know, perhaps as an element about the task itself, and our expectations about the task that mean, actually, they're just as competent as other, you know, say, a builder, maybe as competent as an electrician in their respective trades. But, you know, being an electrician is an easier job to deliver sort of 100% against, you know, perhaps the something about the way, you know, electrical systems are generally structured that follows a particular pattern. And it's a, it's a less complex job, when you turn up to a house to do something, it's very difficult to know exactly what the job is going to entail, you know, all of our houses in this country are all hodgepodge is, you know, it's apparently a lot easier for builders to build a house from scratch than it is to start messing around with an existing existing house. And there may be some element of complexity, and our lack of understanding about what it is realistic to expect in, you know, in the performance of builder, that means we're constantly disappointed. It's not that they're doing a bad job. It's just we think it should be perfect. And perfect is, you know, not within reach. Yeah. But I want to go on the attack

again with that. You don't have to push very hard. Yeah, I think also one of the things it's a self selecting thing as well. So the type of person who can become an electrician, who has to go through this training, and it takes quite a long time, it's expensive to do that. The type of person who does that has to be, let's say, organized, committed, etc, methodical, and methodical and have some sort of reasonable sort of intelligence and good at maths, etc. Whereas to become, let's say, just a laborer, with all respect to our labor listeners, there's very little, as we've said, there's very little barrier to entry. So it can be the sort of person who can just sort of, you know, just get out of bed and just go and do it really. And they can often, in my experience, these people can often be a bit lazy, disorganized, bit thick, you know, without sounding too judgmental. So therefore, when it actually comes to the job, they tend to be the sort of people who are quite unreliable as well. Well, I think that's just putting it out there.

Almost real, sort of, I mean, that's a way of rephrasing the idea of it being, you know, signals, doing their job, really, you know, if the harder it is to do to sort of, you know, acquire, I mean, I mean, having accreditation does not by itself or, you know, having spent four years studying something or whatever, or, you know, learning a trade for 10 years or whatever they those things by themselves don't make you good, right, just by themselves. But they're signals that you are good, you know, and they're hard for people who are crap, you know, whether they're crap, because they're disorganized or unprofessional or whatever, they're just hard for people like that to do. So it works, it works as a signal to create, you know, what's known as a separating equilibrium. And when you get down at the bottom end of your roofers and your builders, they're at the moment, at least, isn't a signal that is functioning to separate those people. So we have what's known as a pooling equilibrium, where you just can't tell the difference and you have to, you're basically taking a gamble. So yeah, I do wonder if we ought to talk about possible responses,

what we might be able to do about this. We can do, we've not got a huge amount of time, but Chris?

Well, I was just going to say something that sort of backs up your theory, Fraser, is if you, I was looking at surveys of least trusted professions in this, in this country, and builders are number five on the list with 14% of people trusting builders. So, and I bet you can guess the four professions that are less trusted. Politicians, Politicians, Journalists, Bankers, Journalists, and come on, the obvious one, Lawyers, Secondhand car sales, Economists, No, you're getting there though, you're getting there. Estate agents. Estate agents, exactly right. So everybody knows what these least trusted professions are. But in many ways, what you were saying about, you can just turn up and do them. Those are by and large professions, perhaps with the exception of journalism, are professions, you know, a politician, what, what, what qualifications do you require? What startup costs? Oh, come on, you've got to,

you've got to put in a lot of effort to get elected into a, into even a council or something.

You don't need knowledge or training in a particular area.

I'm not sure this is quite on the same footing because, you know, everyone says, oh yeah, you mustn't trust journalists. But the fact is everyone consumes news and it's mainly reliable. You know, we do actually trust journalists and we do actually trust estate agents. I've never heard of anyone who's had a rogue estate agent. Yeah, but look, I think we're talking about different things here. It's more like people, these are people we find a little bit slimy and unpleasant rather than people we actually don't trust.

This is cowboyism versus integrity, I guess. Yeah. There's an overlap. But with this, it's just, we don't trust that these people are honest. Look, if we do want to sort of suggest something as to, well, what can we do? Having established why we get Cowboys Builders, if we want to say anything, you've got to do it quickly.

Okay. Well, I would say, you know, well, what, choosing one. I mean, choose... What about word of mouth? Yeah, word of mouth is perfect because it's very hard to fake word of mouth, right? So that's a brilliant way of doing it. The problem is every builder I know who's ever been recommended through word of mouth is booked up for the next 10 years. Right. So there's, you know, but that, yes, obviously, if it's not urgent, then that's the best thing you can do. And that makes sense. And, you know, also, if a builder has established premises, if you can go to them, you know, if you know where they are, you can go to them and talk to them. Then, you know, that's also a good sign. But I think the problem here, and one of the things the Federation of Master Builders wants to bring in is that there isn't licensing for some of these professions. And they want that. They want builders to be licensed. And then, of course, if that happens, great. You know, and so, you know, you look at these other industries that ought to be affected. They have some of the same characteristics. So things like law, you know, healthcare, even things like expensive consumer goods, you know, or luxury goods, where they're expensive one-off purchases, where there isn't very much, you know, information about them. The responses that those sorts of areas have actually, you know, are licensing and accreditation and expensive, you know, expensive footprints.

Yeah, well, I think part of it is simply our cultural acceptance of crap builders. And, you know, when we had sort of, when various Eastern European countries joined the EU, and we had an influx of tradesmen from other countries, I think a lot of people found that they got better service from tradespeople who had trained and worked in other countries than ones that worked here. And, you know, I mean, I'm sure that German builders, for example, the Germans don't walk around going, oh, our builders are terrible. So I think we just simply go, oh, well, builders, they're crap, aren't they? You know, we should really be more sort of aggressive in searching around. And if there's a builder who's booked up, then there should be some mechanism for either them expanding their business rapidly, or you just simply outbidding the person whose work they're already doing, which in itself would create a miss, you know, a lack of trust, but you can't, you can't really push the prices up, you only seem to get people who have got a waiting list.

Yeah, basically, this information asymmetry has buggered up the market. And I think, you know, that's, that's why, you know, when possibly when we get movement on things like accreditation, you know, it could all could all change. Suddenly, we might be living in a paradise of really reliable builders. There we go.

Well built homes.

I just want to finish off on something, something we are good at in the UK. And something that Nick touched upon earlier that I want to come back to is comedy records. Okay? Yeah, where are they? Well, you don't get them so much anymore. Got the lot in the 60s, 70s, 80s, not so much now. Right, so for it. So this is what I wanted to ask you. What is your favourite comedy record? I have two, but you're only allowed one. But one of them, which we'll say for all of us is Right Said Fred, like with Bernie Kribbins, I think it was fantastic.

I thought he might be referring to the band Right Said Fred, who also did comedy. They did close to comedy records. I'm too sexy.

Not far off. Yeah, yeah. But I love that. Right. And it's perfect for our podcast, right? I mean, right. It's just fantastic song. If anyone's not listened to it, heard it, who's listening, go Google Right Said Fred. Yeah, yeah. With builders and the whole building falling down. But I'll tell you my favourite one, which is you couldn't quite call it a novelty, because there is a vein of novelty records, but this is not quite that. It would actually be from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. And Dudley Moore, he does a song which is someone's falling from a building about to jump jump. It's called jump, right? Yeah, where someone's going to jump commit suicide. No, sorry. No, the sorry, the house is burning down and someone's doesn't know what to do. Do you know? Are you familiar with

this? I don't know. Oh, wow. I like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. But it's brilliant. So I

recommend is when it's about it's a song that's about one minute long about someone who's gonna who's thinking of jumping from a burning building. It's just brilliant. So that's my favourite comedy record. What about you guys?

Well, for me, I mentioned Flanders and Swan earlier. I do like the gas man come if it's short and sweet. I think my favourite song by them is called 20 tons of TNT. And it's and it's actually an anti nuclear war song, which is surprising, I think, from someone like Flanders and Swan. But it but it's it's a kind of very light jaunty song based around the idea that everyone in the world, there's enough nuclear weapons so that everyone in the world has effectively 20 tons worth of TNT allocated to them. And it's and it's because it is so sort of light and breezy the song. It's so chilling. It's just I think better than any kind of angst ridden anti war song could ever be. So

yeah, I would put that at the top. It's superb. Very good. Chris, you're looking perplexed. Yeah,

I am. I'm drawing a bit of a blank. Is it is it my boomerang won't come back by Charlie Drake? Great song. What's that? What's that one about Bernard Cribbins digging a hole?

Yeah, I can't I just rings about digging it because I don't want it there. That one.

Yeah, to be honest, I have to say I'm not really a fan of comedy songs. I,

you're part of the problem, then you're you're why you're why you don't get them anymore. Yeah, I can see you possibly as a sort of Tom Lehrer guy.

Um, yeah, I just I just find whenever whenever they got to that bit in in a sketch show or whatever, where they you know, they drew out the piano. And I always used to think these never they're never actually funny. So I'm afraid I'm I'm don't worry, we shall allocate one to you.

Yeah, we'll allocate a spitting image the chicken song. What was it called? The chicken song? Hold a chicken in there. There we go. All right. Um, we'll wrap up there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.