How can you tell a dodgy roofer?

A dodgy roofer is easier to spot than most people think, because the tells are all things that are absent rather than things that are said.

Scott has spent more than 36 years on Surrey roofs, answers the phone himself and hands over a 25-year written workmanship guarantee on every job, from a single repair to a new roof replacement in Godalming.

Call 07428 300474 any time and a real person will pick up.

How can you tell a dodgy roofer?

You can usually tell a dodgy roofer by what is missing: no written quote, no survey of the actual roof, no named standards behind the work, no insurance you can check and no guarantee handed over on paper. Pressure to decide today, cash up front and vague talk about tiles being loose are the other giveaways.

The paperwork tells you more than the patter

A roof is priced from what someone has seen, not from what they guessed at the kerb. If a price arrives without anyone getting eyes on the covering, the battens, the flashings and the ventilation path, it is a number invented to win a signature. A proper quote is fixed, in writing, and says what is being taken off, what is going back on, what happens to the underlay and battens, and how the debris leaves the site.

Ask what is covered afterwards and listen for the answer. A guarantee that lives in a spoken sentence is not a guarantee. Ours is a 25-year written workmanship guarantee, covering repairs as well as full roofs, handed over before the team leaves. Insurance is the same test: Public Liability Insurance either exists as a document or it does not.

On a new roof replacement in Guildford, the paperwork looks the same as anywhere else the scaffold goes up.

• A written scope, not a lump-sum figure on the back of a card.
• No charge and no obligation for the survey or the quote.
• A named person who answers the phone afterwards, day, night or weekend.

Standards are the language a real roofer already speaks

This is where the difference shows fastest. A roofer who works to the British Standards will mention them without being prompted, because those documents dictate how the job is actually built. Fixing patterns and wind uplift come from BS 5534, which is why nails, clips and mechanically fixed ridges replace mortar-bedded guesswork on an exposed slope. Flat roofs are set out under BS 6229, ventilation and condensation risk under BS 5250, gutter and downpipe sizing under BS EN 12056, and leadwork follows Lead Sheet Association guidance on sheet sizes, expansion and welts.

A dodgy roofer talks only about tiles. Someone who does the work talks about what sits under them, because that is what fails. Ask why a valley is being formed the way it is, or how the roof space will breathe once the new underlay is on, and the answer either has detail in it or it changes the subject.

Approved Document L brings its own duty on a re-roof, the requirement to upgrade insulation where more than half of the roof surface is being renewed. That belongs in the quote from the start, not as an extra sprung on you halfway through. For a new roof replacement in Woking, we cover the whole area, and that insulation upgrade is priced in at survey stage.

Where the shortcuts are usually hidden

Most bad roofing is not dramatic. It is a hidden shortcut that buys a few hours and costs you a decade. Mortar smeared over a failed flashing instead of new lead dressed into the brickwork. Ridge tiles rebedded on a roof whose battens are already soft. A chimney repointed with a mix too strong for old brick. Underlay laid without a drainage path at the eaves, so water sits on the fascia. Sheeting screwed through the crown of a profile rather than the trough, when BS 5427 sets out how profiled sheet should be fixed.

Two more that come up constantly. Asbestos-cement garage roofs get broken up and binned by people with no business touching them; the correct route is to assess the sheet and advise the compliant option under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, which is what we do rather than claiming licensed removal work we do not carry out. And roof cleaning gets done with a pressure lance, which strips granules from concrete tiles and drives water under laps. We soft wash at low pressure and scrape moss by hand, and we do not pressure wash roofs.

The coating conversation follows the same pattern. A liquid film sprayed over tired tiles hides the problem and sells a warranty on the film, not the roof. We do not hard sell roof coatings. If a repair is the honest answer, we say so instead of quoting a full replacement, and our new roof replacement services exist for the roofs that genuinely need them.

How a straight job actually runs

The best defence against a dodgy roofer is knowing what a normal job feels like. It starts with a phone call answered by a real person, not a call centre or a form. Then a free survey where the roof is properly inspected, including a drone view where that shows something a ladder cannot. Then an honest fixed price in writing, with no obligation and nothing to pay for the quote. Then the work, done by our own experienced local roofers rather than subcontracted strangers, the site cleared, and the guarantee handed over in writing.

Scott has spent more than 36 years on Surrey roofs and still answers the phone himself. That is the whole test, really: continuity. A roofer who expects to be reachable in ten years builds differently from one who expects to be gone by Friday. Emergencies go to the front of the queue, because a roof letting water in is not a diary item.

If a quote you already hold does not survive the checks above, get a second look before anything is stripped. Nothing on a roof gets cheaper once it has been half done by someone else.

• No survey, no trust. A price without an inspection is a guess.
• Get the standards named. BS 5534, BS 6229 and BS 5250 should come up unprompted.
• Guarantees are documents. If it is not written down, it does not exist.