Dodgy builder jailed for fraud after scamming £1m from Southwark residents

By Robert Firth, Local Democracy Reporter

A dodgy builder who cost homeowners more than £1m over botched home improvements has been locked up for three years.

Richard Nicholls of Hotspur Street in Shrewsbury asked customers based in Southwark to pay him up front for jobs and materials, but then splurged thousands of pounds of their money on his online gambling habit, a sentencing hearing at Inner London Crown Court on Friday heard.

Homeowners, most of them in Southwark, were left with unfinished extensions and other incomplete building work, which they had to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds correcting.

The 35-year-old is estimated to have cost his 11 victims £1.1m between 2016 and 2018, the court heard.

Handing down his sentence to Nicholls for four fraud charges, Mr J M Mulholland KC said Nicholls’s scheme was “dishonest” from “the outset.”

Nicholls was nabbed after some of his victims in Southwark reported him to the local council’s Trading Standards team.

Two of Nicholls’s victims, Owen Rees and his wife, Rosie Raw-Rees were forced to sell their family home and leave London to pay back a loan taken out to correct botched building work at their property in Camberwell.

He said: “The stress caused by his greed and sheer ineptitude as a building contractor caused my wife to suffer panic attacks whilst heavily pregnant with our first son.

“We had to borrow the money stolen by Richard from our family to complete the job, which ultimately meant selling the house and leaving London to pay back the loan. Had we not had this support, we would have lost everything.”

Another couple, Elizabeth Walker and Steve Walker, were forced to cook meals in a microwave in their living room for weeks after building work to their kitchen repeatedly over-ran, the court heard.

At one point their family had to move out of their home into temporary accommodation for a month because the house was in such a bad condition, the court heard.

But when they returned, there was no water or power. Nicholls never finished the work and the Walkers had to pay new builders £10,000 to sort out the mess left by him.

In a victim impact statement read out in court, Mrs Walker said: “I have had to sacrifice treats for my children, summer holidays and outings which were an important part of our live. […] It will definitely delay our retirement.”

Nicholls used some of his victims’ money to feed his online gambling habit. Analysis of his bank records by Southwark council found he had spent £52,000 of customers’ money on online gambling.

He later told staff from Southwark trading standards that he had no formal building qualifications and his background was in fact in sales and real estate, the local authority said.

The court heard that dad-of-four Nicholls had lined up £100,000 to pay his victims in compensation. Recently, he had been running a company managing rental properties in Shrewsbury.

But at the sentencing hearing on Friday, December 23, Mr Mulholland KC disqualified Nicholls from being a director for six years.

A decision about how much compensation Nicholls should pay will be made at a later hearing.

Pictured top: One family’s kitchen left by Nicholls’s botched building work (Picture: Southwark council)