Unwelcome incomers...
YOU might recall the charming, if lightweight TV series An Island Parish which aired a few years back and followed the first year’s duties of a newly-installed cleric on the Scillies.
At one point, not long after his arrival, he was talking to one of the local fishermen and asked him what this word ‘directly’ – which he kept hearing being used – actually meant.
“If I ask people to do something for me they always say they will do it ‘directly’,” he said. “What does it mean?”
“Oh that, Vicar,” said the fisherman. “Well, ’tis a bit like ‘manana’ – only without the same urgency.”
There’s a lot of ‘directly’ around here, too. If someone says he will do something ‘directly’, you can read that as meaning the task will be mentally prioritised along with all the other outstanding matters, duly accorded its correct place in the list and will be attended to as soon as its allotted time comes round. Unless something more important has cropped up in the meantime, of course. In which case, it will have to wait. But generally speaking it will be done. Eventually.
It’s the same with tradespeople. If the painter says he will arrive ready to start at 9 o’clock on Monday you can bet every last penny on the fact that he will present himself on the dot of nine o’clock. On Wednesday week.
But no-one complains. That’s the way of things. The world isn’t going to stop rotating because of a couple of days’ delay.
And on the plus side you know that the job will be executed and done well. That’s one of the benefits of living in a small community. Everything runs on reputation. If someone does a lousy job for you he knows that not only will he not be invited back, pretty soon everyone will know about it and his reputation will be shredded. Word gets around.
Not that in 99% of cases the outcome is anything other than satisfactory. The client gets the job done, the craftsman is paid. His reputation is preserved and enhanced. He knows he will be recommended to others. Everyone is happy.
But that is not so in a minority of cases – a minority which is currently tiny but nonetheless gives cause for concern. And, oddly, in all the instances mentioned to me, the clients in question have been incomers. Specifically from the Home Counties.
Now I have some acquaintance with the Home Counties, one of my sisters having spent somewhat more than half of her life in Surrey. And – as I can vouch from her own experiences – in that area there are few, if any cosy relationships with tradespeople of the kind that are routinely enjoyed here.
Homeowners there generally spend their time being ripped off by sharks, charlatans and shysters, fleeced by fly-by-night companies hallmarked by Del Boy business ethics, and trying to seek redress for shoddy workmanship. Getting any tradesman in – assuming you can find one – is a nightmare. You can congratulate yourself on your good fortune if, once finished, you don’t discover they have walked away with the spoons.
The entire way of life at that end of the country is perpetually in overdrive. People are fiercely competitive. They drive aggressively, indulge endlessly in one-upmanship whether relating to houses, cars, clothes or holidays and are generally far more snarly and cynical than those living west of Salisbury Plain.
And then they sell their heavily pimped-up semis for a million or more, move to Somerset and acquire a small mansion for the same price with change to spare and start throwing their weight around with tradesmen. Who – because they have never known any other way to approach them – are generally treated like dirt.
Mostly this manifests itself in endless, whining complaints about the quality or lateness of the work, and almost inevitably the cost.
One local trader reported having to make more than a dozen return visits to a house where he had installed windows because the client complained one of them was two millimetres out of true at the top.
It was pointed out to him that this was due to the way the house had been constructed rather than any defect in the window. But that was rejected. The work, he was told, was substandard and therefore would not be paid for. The wrangling went on for months and in the end the trader had to accept part settlement just to get shot of the whole thing. But he was, naturally, out of pocket.
Another Home Counties émigré demanded to see every single invoice for materials the builder bought for an extension just to make sure he wasn’t being overcharged – and still delayed final payment for more than a year.
The problem has become more acute since Covid visited havoc on the construction industry, materials became scarce if not completely unavailable, and their costs went off the scale, often impacting heavily on the price of jobs.
In one instance, this led to the cost of a house improvement rising by more than £3,000 between the time when it was costed and when it was eventually completed once the builders were back on site.
The client simply refused to pay the extra, claiming that an estimate was proof of a binding agreement and that any uplift in costs should be borne by the builder. Who now, as he told me, has to drive by that house on an almost daily basis and reflect on the £3,000 he has invested in it.
For businesses such as his – generally one – or two-man – affairs, such sums (which might appear relatively trivial to larger companies) are important. They cannot just be written off. They can make the difference between turning a small profit at the end of the year and increased indebtedness, leading to the enterprise being closed down.
The one encouraging aspect of all this is that social media is now allowing some measure of redress, and blessed be the name of social media for doing so. Because the names of these bad payers are being disseminated. Traders who have had their fingers burned in dealing with truculent incomers are simply posting their names and addresses – and the sums outstanding – online as a warning to others.
So while the incomers may have money to splash around they may soon experience some difficulty in doing so, as news spreads of their way of doing business and the attitudes they adopt to skilled tradesman. They are likely to find builders, painters, plumbers and electricians simply ‘too busy’.
Word – they are rapidly going to discover – does indeed get around.