The Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires every service to be performed with reasonable care and skill. If it is not, your first remedy is repeat performance — the trader must put it right at their own cost. Only where that is impossible, or they fail to do it in reasonable time, can you demand a price reduction.
What standard does the law actually set?
Four terms are treated as part of every consumer service contract, whether or not anyone wrote them down.
- Section 49 — "Every contract to supply a service is to be treated as including a term that the trader must perform the service with reasonable care and skill."
- Section 50 — anything the trader said or wrote about themselves or the service becomes a binding term, where you took it into account in deciding to enter the contract or in making a decision about the service afterwards. This expressly includes information the trader was required to give you under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013.
- Section 51 — where no price was fixed, you must pay a reasonable price for the service "and no more".
- Section 52 — where no time was fixed, the trader must perform within a reasonable time.
Section 49 is the one most complaints turn on, and it is worth being precise about what it means. It is not a guarantee of a perfect result. It is a standard of workmanship: the care and skill a reasonably competent person in that trade would have brought. Work that a competent tradesperson would not have left in that state falls below it.
Remedy one: repeat performance
Section 55 gives you the right to require the trader to "perform the service again, to the extent necessary to complete its performance in conformity with the contract".
Three conditions come with it, all in your favour. The trader must do it within a reasonable time, without significant inconvenience to you, and must bear any necessary costs of doing so — materials, labour, the lot. You do not pay twice for the same job.
There is one limit: you cannot require repeat performance where completing the service in conformity with the contract is impossible. A hedge cut too short cannot be uncut.
In practice, offering the trader the chance to put it right is not merely a legal step, it is usually the fastest resolution. Most disputes that end badly began with a customer who never told the trader what was wrong, and a trader who found out from a solicitor’s letter.
Remedy two: price reduction
Section 56 gives the right to require the trader to reduce the price "by an appropriate amount, including the right to receive a refund for anything already paid above the reduced amount". Where a refund is due, it must be given without undue delay and in any event within 14 days of the trader agreeing that you are entitled to it, using the same means of payment you used, unless you agree otherwise.
The order matters. Price reduction is not a free choice you make instead of repeat performance. It becomes available where repeat performance is impossible, or where the trader has failed to do it within a reasonable time or without significant inconvenience to you, or where the breach is of the section 52 term about time.
"An appropriate amount" can be the whole price, if what was delivered was worth nothing. More often it is the difference between what you paid and what the work was actually worth.
Section 54 also preserves the other remedies you would ordinarily have — damages, and in some cases treating the contract as at an end. These sit alongside the two statutory remedies rather than replacing them.
How should you complain?
The mechanics decide most outcomes.
- Put it in writing, early. Email, so it is dated and kept. Describe what is wrong factually, without adjectives.
- Say what you are asking for and under which right. "I am requiring repeat performance under section 55 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015" is a sentence that changes the tone of a reply.
- Give a specific deadline that is genuinely reasonable for the work involved.
- Photograph everything, dated, before anything is disturbed.
- Keep the paperwork — the quote, the Schedule 2 information, invoices, messages.
- Do not pay the balance and hope. Once the money is gone your leverage is gone with it. Equally, do not simply refuse to pay everything you owe: withhold an amount that reflects the defect.
- Do not have someone else fix it before you have given the trader the chance to. That can cost you the right to repeat performance.
Can you go to an ombudsman?
Sometimes, and the ground here has recently shifted. The Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Disputes (Competent Authorities and Information) Regulations 2015 were revoked on 6 April 2026 by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which replaced the old voluntary accreditation arrangements with a mandatory accreditation framework for consumer ADR providers, implemented by regulations made in 2026. The Chartered Trading Standards Institute has been given functions in relation to consumer ADR under the Act.
What that means for you in practice: alternative dispute resolution remains, for most trades, something the trader has to agree to take part in — it is not a court you can compel them into. Where a trade body or a scheme the trader has joined commits them to a dispute process, that commitment is enforceable as part of what they signed up to, which is one of the more concrete reasons scheme membership is worth checking before you hire rather than after.
Trading Standards, and the courts
Citizens Advice runs the consumer service that gives advice and passes reports to Trading Standards. Trading Standards enforces the law against traders; it does not act as your representative or recover your money, so reporting a trader and pursuing your own claim are two separate things and you may need to do both.
If it comes to a claim, section 5 of the Limitation Act 1980 sets the outside limit for an action founded on simple contract: "six years from the date on which the cause of action accrued". Scotland has its own limitation rules. Six years is a long stop, not a plan — evidence and memories degrade, and traders dissolve their companies.
What to do next
If the work is live, write the email today setting out the defect and requiring repeat performance. If it has gone past that, work out whether repeat performance is genuinely impossible or merely refused, because that is what decides which remedy you are entitled to.
Before you hire the next trader, the checks are cheaper than the remedies. Our guide to checking a UK trader is registered covers what exists trade by trade, and every category page on this directory states what the law requires of that trade and how to verify it.