TrustMark consultation could make it the single route for customer complaints

TrustMark wants to become the single place your customers go when they complain about your work, and it is asking the trade what it thinks before it decides. That proposal sits inside a TrustMark consultation that Professional Heating and Plumbing Installer (PHPI) reports opened on 22 September and closes at 11:59 on 27 October. If you want a say, that closing time is the date that matters.

The consultation only bites if your business is registered with TrustMark. Knowing when it closes belongs with your other grants and schemes deadlines, because responding is a decision you make now while the proposals are still open. That registration already sits behind publicly funded work, from the boiler upgrade scheme overhaul onward, and being on the right register is what buyers are told to check before they hire, the point behind the recent gas safe register warning over rogue traders. For registered firms the consultation also proposes to clarify what you are responsible for, alongside the roles of TrustMark and its Scheme Providers.

TrustMark consultation reaches your responsibilities, not just complaints

The proposals go wider than the complaints desk. They would clarify the roles of registered businesses and Scheme Providers, widen the analytical tools and data behind quality assurance, and add stronger financial protections, with no detail yet on how those protections would work. The saving from a single complaints line is aimed at the Scheme Providers who run the scheme, not at you.

Charlotte Carter, TrustMark’s Chief Operating Officer, frames the changes around consumer protection. Quoted by Professional Heating and Plumbing Installer, she puts consumer detriment in the home improvements market at over £10 billion, and argues that a clearer scheme is what protects buyers further.

Carter’s invitation to the sector is direct:

“Our consultation outlines the changes being considered and we strongly encourage our partners across the sector to participate. We want to hear their views and ideas and include their expertise and knowledge in the thinking going into decisions about our scheme.”

TrustMark consultation has not settled the detail yet

TrustMark has not given an approval or implementation date, so nothing here is fixed, and the summary PHPI points to does not spell out how the single complaints line would handle a case or how you would submit a response. If you want to shape it, you respond through TrustMark’s own website before the consultation closes. What a single complaints line would actually ask of you is still open, which is rather the point of asking first.