Cowboy Builder Paid £140,000 By Family Leaves Dream Home Looking Like 'Bomb Site' With No Roof

A cowboy builder who was paid nearly £140,000 to renovate a family home left it like a 'bomb site' with no roof before disappearing.

Radcliffe Ogier, 52, and his wife Nashreen, 50, sold their house in Enfield, London, and paid £280,000 for the property in the leafy Selly Oak area of Birmingham in 2012.

They saved up for a year before contacting builder Scott Devlin, 41, in summer 2013.

But after initially paying Devlin £5,000-a-week, the builder's workforce began to dwindle after a few months and he has since vanished altogether.

Despite being promised their renovation was an eight-month job, Mr Ogier quickly noticed that the amount of workers at the site had dropped off by the summer of 2014.

The Ogiers did manage to meet the elusive builder at a local pub in January this year but say he sent workers around for one day before disappearing again.

They have now been left sleeping at the homes of kind-hearted friends and family members in London while they desperately tried to find someone to fix the mess left behind.

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Retired BT engineer Radcliffe said Devlin has 'destroyed their lives' after they paid him a staggering £139,000 in installments.

Shocking pictures show the family’s supposed dream retirement home looking more like a building site with the roof ripped off the property and debris scattered everywhere.

Dad-of-three Radcliffe said: 'He has destroyed our lives. We are enduring all the stress in the world and all because of this idiot. He should be locked away.

'We sourced him through mybuilder.com in 2013 and he met us in a café and he gave us a quote and said he could start immediately.

'He can talk the talk. He took us to see some of his jobs, and we were really impressed with them.

'It all started so well. We can’t fault what was done in the first few months. We had five or six people on the job. Slowly, but surely, they started to disappear.

'Gradually, the numbers depleted from six to five to four to three. It was going backward and forward.

'By the summer of 2014, even the digger had disappeared. We knew then that we were in real trouble.

'Sometimes there would be a few people there but sometimes I would come up from London and there would be no-one there.

'The alarm bells really began to ring when someone came to collect the portable toilet that had been on the lawn for six months because it hadn’t been paid for.

'This was our final home, we wanted it to be comfortable. But this is not a home. It is a pile of bricks.'

A woman who answered the door to a home Devlin is listed as living at in Tamworth, Staffs., claimed not to know him last weekend.

But speaking in March this year, when he was accused of wrecking another victim’s home, the divorced dad-of-two claimed to be a victim too.

He said: 'I’m not the kind of person to rip people off – all the positive reviews show that.'

Devlin was the former boss of Magical Kitchens, based in Sutton Coldfield, West Mids, which was made bankrupt in 2013.

Speaking in March, he claimed the small business crumbled because he was let down by skilled tradesmen he recruited.

He said: 'I’m applying for jobs. All the workmen have been paid off to stop them going to my mum’s door.

'It’ll take three or four years to be debt-free and happy again.'