Poor workmanship drives almost two-thirds of complaints

Poor workmanship is the clearest driver of home maintenance and improvement complaints, with substandard services accounting for 114,442 cases across the analysis period.

That means 63.8% of all complaints were linked to service quality, far ahead of any other complaint type.

Quality concerns also appear. Defective goods ranked second, with 26,473 complaints, equal to 14.8% of the total. These two categories show how often complaints relate to either the standard of work completed or the quality of the materials, products, or fittings involved.

The main complaint types were:

• Substandard services: 114,442 complaints, equal to 63.8%
• Defective goods: 26,473 complaints, equal to 14.8%
• Prices and charges: 6,777 complaints, equal to 3.8%
• Business practices: 5,690 complaints, equal to 3.2%
• Selling practices: 4,657 complaints, equal to 2.6%

Because ‘substandard services’ account for such a large share of complaints, let’s have a look at this category in more detail.

Most complaints in this group were logged under the same broad ‘substandard services’ label. Failure or delay in providing a service accounted for 13,171 complaints, equal to 11.5% of substandard service cases.

This means more than one in 10 complaints within the substandard services category related to work being delayed or not provided at all. This can be one of the most difficult issues to manage, especially when a room or home is unusable, materials have already been ordered, or other trades are waiting for one stage of the job to finish.

There were also 4,003 safety-related substandard service complaints and 1,823 complaints linked to damage to belongings or property, showing that poor work can affect more than just the project's completion date.