PAYING A BUILDER: Check one date on Companies House before you hand over a deposit

Before handing a builder a deposit, look the company up on Companies House and find the date its accounts were due. If that date has passed, ask why before any money moves.

That is the advice from insolvency firm Clarke Bell, which followed thousands of building and trades companies for a year to see which went under, and found overdue accounts were one of the clearest early warnings.

Across the Swansea Bay City Region it tracked 2,816 building and trades companies. Of the 49 whose accounts were overdue at the start, 23 were insolvent, struck off or facing strike-off a year later: 46.9%.

Among firms whose accounts were up to date, the figure was 11.1%. Clarke Bell puts that as firms with overdue accounts being 4.2 times more likely to be “gone or going”.

The Welsh picture is starker. Of 266 Welsh firms with overdue accounts, 58.3% were gone or going within the year, against 10.6% of those up to date, or 5.5 times the risk. Across the UK the split was 51% to 10%.

The two-minute check

The Companies House register is free to search. If the name on the van or the quote is not the registered company name, ask for the company name or number.

Two dates matter. One is when the accounts were due. The other is the confirmation statement, the annual return every company must file; if that is overdue, Clarke Bell says, it “is a strong sign that a company may be struck off”.

The firm also suggests searching The Gazette, where winding-up petitions are published.

And it suggests keeping deposits small and paying by credit card where possible. Under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act, the card provider can be jointly liable for anything costing more than £100 and up to £30,000.

John Bell, Clarke Bell’s senior partner, said: “When a building company goes into liquidation, customers who have paid a deposit usually join the queue of unsecured creditors, and they rarely get much back.”

“Overdue accounts are often one of the first public signs that a company is struggling. It takes two minutes to check, and it could save you thousands.”

What the numbers can and cannot tell you

Clarke Bell’s own caveat: a warning sign raises the odds, it does not predict what happens to any one company. Firms can be struck off for reasons other than failure, including directors closing a company that never traded. And the checks only work for limited companies; sole traders and partnerships are not on the register.

The local sample is small. The 49 Swansea Bay firms include 19 registered in Swansea itself, of which 10 were gone or going, a base Clarke Bell says is too small to hang a headline on. Across Swansea and Neath Port Talbot together, 13 of 28 overdue firms, 46.4%, had gone or were going, against 11.9% of those up to date.

The analysis used Companies House data from 1 September 2025 and 1 September 2026, Insolvency Service figures and The Gazette, covering trading construction companies at least a year old, with region taken from the registered office postcode.

The local backdrop

Trading Standards teams here have had a busy year with the other kind of bad builder. A Neath roofer was jailed in July for turning gutter cleans into around £40,000 of fraudulent roofing work, and two Merlins Bridge men admitted fraud over garden clearance work last month and will be sentenced in November. Swansea’s team warned over cold callers in rural communities in August.

The UK Government’s answer, announced the same month, is an Approved Code for traders and a Trusted Payments service that holds a customer’s money and releases it as the work is done. Until that beds in, the Companies House check costs nothing.

Author

Kit Peters

Kit Peters is a journalist and the editor of Swansea Bay News, covering Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire since 2020.