After losing her mum to cancer, a woman from Essex decided to do something in her memory. She resolved to go ahead with the extension to her home that was originally planned as a place to care for her mother.

Still grieving, she chose a builder recommended to her by a neighbour. She had every reason to think she could trust him. After all, how cruel would a person have to be to take advantage of someone in their time of need?

But like the third of adults in Britain that have hired a builder who turned out to be unreliable or unqualified, this woman found out the answer to that question the hard way.

The work done on her house was so shoddy that it was eventually deemed unsafe to live in. The costs that followed meant she was forced to remortgage and had to rely on the rest of her family just to get by. Like anyone in that situation would be, she was pushed to breaking point.

And then she was pushed past it. Exhausted and broken by events she had absolutely no control over, the stress became unbearable. She sadly tried to take her own life.

Thankfully, she is still with us today. But too many cowboy builders are still getting away with it. And I won't sit back while they make more victims out of vulnerable people, hardworking families and genuine tradespeople up and down this country.

Some might dismiss the sort of people who do this kind of thing as 'wheeler dealers' or 'chancers'. But they're more than that. They prey on the vulnerable, they rob our neighbours of their futures and, above all else, they destroy lives.

They're crooks – and it's about time we treated them like it.

So, today, we're putting the cowboys out of business.

Most builders in this country are decent people who take pride in their work and charge a fair price for it. They build our homes, our schools and are always there with tools in hand when things go wrong. But the small number who aren't tend to follow the same pattern: take a big deposit, do half a job, then disappear with your hard-earned money.

That's got to change. So we're backing a new system that gives you the option to have your money held safely and released bit by bit as the work is completed. Do the work, get paid. It's as simple as that. And we'll help our good builders stand out from the cowboys too.

Tradespeople who meet our new set of standards will be able to show customers that they do things properly and can be trusted with their homes. This is another one of our everyday fixes to give people support with the cost of living. According to the Federation of Master Builders, homeowners lost a massive £14.3billion to cowboy builders between 2020 and 2025 – that's an average of £1,759 per person affected. And when life is already so hard for so many families, the last thing they should have to worry about is being ripped off as well.

So this is about ensuring people have some breathing space when they need it most.

But it goes deeper than that too. It gets to the heart of who we are and the kind of country we're trying to build together – a country built on fairness.

Today, that means standing up for the customers who do the right thing and expect a fair deal. And it means standing up for the decent builders and tradespeople who work hard, play by the rules and are sick of seeing dodgy dealers steal their customers and give their industry a bad name.

That same principle runs through everything we're doing. From capping bus fares to rebuilding technical education, when you put the work in, when you treat others with respect, you should expect to be treated fairly too.

And when you aren't, you should expect your government to be on your side. That's the only way we get people to start believing that things really can be different this time.

The woman I spoke about earlier ended her story with a message for us: 'I implore the Government to act.'

Today, I want her to know: we heard you. We're acting. And we'll keep acting until people in every part of this country finally believe in Britain again.