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This paper seeks to provide an examination of the UK private house building industry and its record of delivering to customers a quality end product.

The paper reviews the literature regarding quality and the perception of quality along with the problem of defining quality in relation to new private houses, and also includes the results from both qualitative and quantitative data collection from interviews and questionnaires with new home owners, showing the scope of the problem in the Northwest of England. The literature examines not only the private house building industry, but also other industries and their quality procedures. The paper then goes on to identify and analyse some of the possible reasons for the apparent lack of customer satisfaction with current UK private house builders and their products.

The industry must either find out for itself what it is that its customers want or take note of the current research. The author is of the opinion that it is not a major task to significantly improve the current customer satisfaction ratings and frequency of defects reported in new houses. The house builders need to establish a set of quality criteria that they can deliver to their customers on a consistent basis, they need to establish a robust management system that ensures that the tradespeople on site are aware of the quality criteria and that the company will accept no deviation from the agreed criteria. This would then ensure that the customer has a set of criteria on which to judge the level of quality delivered in the end product and not be allowed to make subjective assessments on non‐existing criteria. In short, the builder would then only have to work towards delivering one set of criteria instead of multiple criteria depending on the number of customers on each site.

This is currently an area that is under‐researched and thus this is original research.

Research on housing defects has limited its enquiry to the classifications of defects, potential impact of defects, and their detection and remediation during construction and the builder’s liability period, without considering the warranty period. The purpose of this paper is to better understand which impacts of defects are perceived as important by the key stakeholders involved in their detection and remediation over the construction, builder’s liability and insurer’s warranty periods.

The questionnaire survey approach was used. The questionnaire distribution list was drawn from the UK’s largest warranty provider (WP) and approved inspector’s records. The questionnaire was distributed to 2003 people, receiving 292 responses, a response rate of 15 per cent.

This research challenges the assertion that the house building industry (i.e. house builders (HBs), building inspectors and WPs) is predominantly cost focussed and finds that the potential impact of defects on home occupants (HOs) are their primary concern. In contrast, the HOs’ appear solely focussed on the disruption defects caused on their daily lives and perceive a lack customer focus in the house building industry.

This study provides empirical evidence of the contrasting view of the house building industry and HOs with respect to the prioritisation of the impacts of defects. Further, this research offers HBs an alternative approach to determine which defects should be targeted for reduction purposes which may lead to improved levels of customer satisfaction.