Category: Grumps

This is something that I reported to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) in 2021.

The unregulated firm (firm “R”)

There is a surveying firm that is run by someone that works as an expert witness. Let’s call this “firm R”.

I was given a copy of this individual’s CV. This appeared in several disclosure bundles that I was given as part of cases that I was involved in.

The very first line of his expert CV caught my attention.

“I am a Member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors”.

That was literally the first line.

After seeing that, I decided to check if this person appeared in the RICS members directory. They didn’t.

I emailed the firm asking them to confirm this individual’s RICS membership number.

The response that came back said: “he is a member but not chartered… he’s on the senior professional technical route…”

He was not a qualified member of RICS. He wasn’t AssocRICS, MRICS, or FRICS.

He was given his membership number when he enrolled for assessment. That is not the same as being a qualified member.

Why put that on your CV then? Well, the only explanation would be to mislead people.

If he didn’t want to mislead anyone, all he needed to say was that he was currently enrolled on the senior professional route and he planned to come forward for assessment in the future.

He didn’t do that.

He made a statement, which he subsequently defended, which would make someone think that he was far more qualified than he actually was.

Let’s take a closer look

This individual ran two different surveying firms.

They had three fee earning staff all claiming to be chartered surveyors when they were not.

You heard that right. Not one, not two, but three. And that’s just what I know about in my little bubble down in the south-east of England.

That’s not a coincidence. There’s an obvious pattern there.

Reporting this to RICS

This was reported to RICS in 2021.

The individual, despite technically being a “member”, was not sanctioned. There was no published outcome for this at all.

RICS are able to investigate a complaint and publish the outcome even if the member is not a qualified member.

RICS have done this before when people have made false statements on their application form etc. They decided they didn’t want do that in this case.

So what’s the situation now?

Five years on, this individual is still not qualified with RICS.

As far as I am aware, he is not qualified with a professional body anywhere.

He still practises as an expert witness.

He still runs a surveying firm. The same firm where multiple fee earners were falsely claiming to be chartered surveyors.

The surveying firm is still not regulated. They are not answerable to anyone. Consumers are none the wiser.

Make it make sense.

I came across an interesting blog post this week about fake surveying websites and the risks they pose to both consumers and legitimate professionals. If you would like to read the original article, you can find it here.

It got me thinking.

A few years ago, spotting a fraudulent website was pretty straightforward. The grammar was terrible, the photographs were obviously stock images, the claims were ridiculous, and the whole thing didn’t look right.

Artificial intelligence has changed that.

Today, AI can produce a convincing website in seconds. It can create polished biographies, glowing customer reviews, professional looking logos, and even photographs of people that don’t exist.

Some of these AI-generated images can be quite amusing. People using bizarre equipment that doesn’t actually exist, back-to-front reflections in a window, gormless people wearing hard hats staring vacuously into an iPad.

The problem is that the technology is improving.

Very quickly.

And that’s no joke.

The real question

This means that the old way of judging a business by its website is becoming increasingly unreliable.

The question is no longer whether a website looks professional.

The real question is whether there is an actual accountable professional behind it.

Who are they?

What qualifications do they have?

Are they regulated?

Can you verify any of the information they are presenting?

Those questions are more important than an impressive looking website.

It’s not just consumers

There is another problem.

Fraudulent operators do not just affect the public. They affect legitimate professionals as well.

A convincing website can borrow the language, appearance, and credibility of genuine chartered practices. It can imitate established firms, misuse professional designations, copy report formats, and even adopt local branding to appear authentic.

There may be something like a hundred of these websites already in existence. Possibly more.

The average member of the public is unlikely to know the difference.

If they have a bad experience, they are not necessarily going to think that one individual was dishonest.

They may simply conclude that all surveyors cannot be trusted. And who would blame them?

That damages the reputation of the entire profession.

The impact on small firms

There is also a commercial aspect to this.

Many small surveying firms rely on local work.

A fake website can target town and county based search terms, appear in local search results, and attract instructions with unrealistically low prices.

Of course, there is a reason they can charge less.

They may not have the same professional costs.

They may not have insurance.

They may not be regulated.

They may not have any meaningful accountability.

Competing with that is difficult.

Trust, but verify

The article suggested that greater transparency is one possible answer, and I think there is a lot to be said for that.

Legitimate surveyors should make it easy for clients to check who they are.

Membership numbers should be easy to find.

Professional registrations should be easy to verify.

People should know who they are instructing and what qualifications that person holds.

Clear complaints procedures and genuine professional histories also help.

Basic due diligence and reporting suspicious websites is worthwhile as well.

Final thoughts

Artificial intelligence is going to make this problem worse before it gets better.

I suspect we will see increasingly sophisticated attempts to impersonate legitimate firms and professionals.

The technology can generate a convincing website.

It can generate a convincing biography.

It can even generate a convincing face.

There is one thing it cannot replicate.

A genuine professional with real qualifications, real experience, and real accountability for the work they produce.

At least, not yet.

First example (“agency D”)

I met a very pleasant gentleman at a joint inspection this week.

He mentioned that he had recently been working through an agency. Let’s call this firm “agency D”. The agency is regulated by RICS and run by a Chartered Surveyor.

As we were chatting, he said this firm had edited one of his reports without his permission.

He said this was not a typo or a minor amendment. He told me the difference was something like 500%.

I can only assume these costs were increased so the overall quantum would sit above a particular threshold.

Anyway, I asked him a fairly obvious question.

“Did you report it?”

He said no.

He said the agency owed him a lot of money and he wanted to get that sorted out first.

Second example (“lawyer A”)

Someone else that I know told me a similar story.

He said that his report had been edited without his knowledge.

This time, the changes had been made by a lawyer.

He only discovered this on the day of the trial when he was handed a copy of his own report.

Except it was not his report anymore.

Someone had edited the document to make it more favourable to their client’s case. No one had bothered to tell him or seek his approval. By that point, the evidence had already been filed and his edited report was already sitting in the trial bundle.

Again, I asked him if he had reported it.

He said no.

I can understand why he would be reluctant to come forward.

Imagine standing up in court and telling a judge that someone had tampered with your evidence.

That is a serious allegation.

If you get it wrong, you could find yourself in a great deal of trouble. Even if you are right, that decision would not be without its consequences.

Sometimes, I suspect, people simply decide it is easier to turn a blind eye.

Third example (“agency M”)

I will not name the agency involved. They are a large firm and must turn out thousands of reports a year.

I have, however, heard a number of people raise concerns about this company.

Again, the allegations seem to be changes to quantum and increased cost estimates.

As far as I am aware, none of this has been reported.

I’m not sure if this agency is a regulated business. I don’t think it is.

Who would you even report this to?

Fourth example (“agency N”)

This one I witnessed myself.

A number of years ago, I attended a joint inspection with another surveyor. He was a graduate surveyor and, it has to be said, a likeable chap.

The agency was run by a Chartered Surveyor. Let’s call this firm “agency N”. I’m not sure if the business was regulated by RICS at that point in time.

After the inspection, he sent his report to the agency that had instructed him. I was copied into that email.

I later received a copy of his report which came direct from the agency itself.

The surveyor’s name had been changed.

The name had changed from Joe Bloggs BSc(Hons) to Thomas Joe Bloggs MRICS.

This second individual had a similar sounding name and was a Chartered Surveyor. However, he didn’t actually work for the agency.

His name had presumably been plucked from the RICS directory and selected because it was similar to our Joe Bloggs BSc(Hons).

The costs had also changed and, once again, had conveniently increased. The costs were now just above this threshold so the agency’s client could recover their legal costs.

I spoke to the surveyor I had met on site after receiving this amended report. He knew nothing about it.

His name had been changed without his permission. His report had been altered without his permission. He had no idea what had happened.

He was understandably worried.

I reported what I had seen to RICS.

Nothing happened.

I was there. I witnessed it. I have copies of the documents showing the changes that had been made.

No action was taken.

Final thoughts

A lot of what’s happening out there is going unreported.

The stuff that is being reported isn’t being taken seriously, and no one is acting on it.

What we need is for the victims (and these people are victims) to come forward. We also need these complaints to be taken seriously when people are brave enough to speak up.

That said, I’m not hopeful. I’m not expecting anything to change.

It’s all very sad, if you ask me.

Reggie says that I should treat myself to a Mint Magnum. He says that I deserve it and it’ll help me unwind. I think he’s probably right. So that’s what I’m off to do.

Bye for now.

Beware of the sausage

Did you know that sausages are carcinogenic?

The World Health Organisation (WHO), through its cancer research arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, classifies processed meat, including many sausages, as a “Group 1” carcinogen.

In simple terms, there is strong evidence that consuming processed meat can increase the risk of certain cancers.

And yet, anyone can walk into a supermarket and buy sausages if they want to.

They have not been banned. There are no warning labels plastered across the packaging like you would see on cigarettes.

So should you eat them?

Probably, in moderation.

If you spent your life obsessing over every possible carcinogen identified by the WHO, you would probably never leave the house. That is not healthy either.

The important thing is balance. Look at the evidence properly. Understand the actual level of risk, rather than jump straight to the most extreme conclusion possible.

Is there a link between moulds in buildings and cancer?

This is where things start to become interesting.

I have seen the same image appear on my LinkedIn feed twice in the last two weeks.

The image is an infographic taken from the European Environment Agency (EEA) website. You can find the original image and article here.

In both cases, the entire left-hand column titled “exposure scenarios” had been cropped out.

For me, that information is quite important and shouldn’t be left out.

The infographic itself is presenting potential harms involving contaminated food and very specific occupational exposures.

In other words, people working in agriculture or food processing environments, where they may be handling large volumes of contaminated material and inhaling significant quantities of contaminated dust over long periods of time.

Those risks are already well understood.

One example is a form of hypersensitivity pneumonitis known as “Farmer’s Lung”. The clue is very much in the name.

There’s just one problem. The harms shown on that infographic have nothing to do with ordinary mould exposure in homes.

For anyone reading these posts online and suddenly worrying that the mould in their bathroom might give them liver cancer or kidney cancer, I will quote directly from the World Health Organisation (WHO):

“There is no epidemiological evidence for an association between exposure in damp buildings and cancer.”

That seems fairly clear to me.

Look at the evidence

People need to be careful about adopting the most extreme interpretation of something and then amplifying it online.

Misinformation is still misinformation, even when it is shared with good intentions.

As professionals, regardless of status or experience, we all have a responsibility to check where information has come from.

I would also be cautious about engaging with or reposting misleading content, because doing so can easily be interpreted as some form of endorsement.

If in doubt, seek advice from a properly qualified professional. Don’t believe everything you see online.

As I always say, if someone is making extraordinary claims, you would expect them to have extraordinary qualifications and experience. If they do not, well, make of that what you will.

What is Hanlon’s razor?

There is an old saying commonly known as Hanlon’s razor:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

It is a useful principle to keep in mind.

It is very easy to jump to conclusions about people and their motives. I am always conscious that people can do things without fully understanding what they are doing, or the consequences that follow.

For that reason, I do not automatically assume that someone has acted deliberately or maliciously.

Sometimes people just get it wrong. As everyone knows, it happens to the best of us.

Let’s look at some examples

There are some things which could genuinely be innocent mistakes.

For example:

• Being incompetent without realising it
• Making an error of judgement
• Misunderstanding a process or requirement
• Overestimating your own ability

None of those things are ideal, but they are at least capable of innocent explanation.

Then there are other things which become far more difficult to defend.

For example:

• Pretending to be someone else in order to hide being bankrupt
• Pretending to have a degree
• Pretending to be a chartered professional when you are not
• Inventing qualifications
• Producing a fake certificate
• Editing an expert’s report without their knowledge
• Falsifying important legal documents
• Deliberately misleading a tribunal
• Pretending to be ill in order to avoid being cross-examined in court
• Inappropriate and unwanted sexual contact during inspections

It’s very difficult to explain behaviour like that away as simple incompetence or misunderstanding. A common excuse seems to be an “admin glitch” or similar.

Final thoughts

The purpose of this blog is not simply to pick fights with people.

I want this to function as something of an open diary. A place to record thoughts and observations as these things happen. It’s an aide-mémoire of sorts.

There are serious issues within our industry, and those issues should be the focus.

There is also a huge amount that I still want to write about. Posting once a week makes that difficult, but I am hoping to get most of it written up by Christmas.

We shall see!

Did you miss it?

The Chartered Association of Building Engineers (CABE) quietly published the disciplinary panel’s findings for Aaran Marriner-Clark about a week ago.

You can find the page listing all disciplinary outcomes here. For this specific outcome, you’ll find that here.

One thing worth bearing in mind is that these documents do not stay online forever. If you are interested in this sort of thing, it is probably worth downloading a copy while it is still available.

And if it has already disappeared by the time you read this, feel free to contact me and I will happily send it over.

What did they find?

Aaran Marriner-Clark was providing structural engineering services to a client. Not surprisingly, this didn’t go well.

Some of the key findings were as follows:

• He had misrepresented himself as a structural engineer
• The report he provided was limited in scope and contained minimal technical detail
• His communications with the client were threatening, unprofessional, and amounted to bullying
• He was found to be in breach of Professional Standards 2 and 3
• His Fellowship was removed
• He was required to provide a written undertaking confirming that he would not misrepresent himself or suggest that he possessed competencies beyond those held again

None of that makes for particularly comfortable reading.

The made up degree

No, I’m not talking about his made up PhD. That’s already been confirmed by the universities in writing.

On his CV, he claims to hold an MSc in Structural Building Surveying from Suffolk College.

So I decided to look into it.

Apparently, this MSc was obtained in the early 1990s. At that time, Suffolk College didn’t have any degree awarding powers, so all degrees were validated externally by the University of East Anglia.

I submitted a Freedom of Information request.

The University of East Anglia responded on 9 April 2026 and confirmed that they have never run courses in Building Surveying, Structural Building Surveying, or anything remotely similar.

I then contacted the University of Suffolk, which now holds the historical records for Suffolk College.

The University of Suffolk responded on 30 April 2026 and the answer was exactly the same. They have never run courses in Building Surveying, Structural Building Surveying, or anything remotely similar.

LinkedIn has more than a billion users worldwide. I could not find a single person with a degree in Structural Building Surveying, or anything remotely similar, from Suffolk College. Not one.

Naughty boy.

Final thoughts

Structural engineering is not a game. If you get this wrong, someone could get killed.

How can someone with no qualifications or formal training in structural engineering go out and start providing structural engineering services?

Absolutely crazy.

Background

You may remember this case from a previous post. If you want to revisit the original post, you can find it here.

This individual stated the following on an expert witness CV:

1. They were a Chartered Environmental Health Practitioner. In reality, they are not Chartered. They are therefore not permitted to use the title Chartered Environmental Health Practitioner.
2. Under the “Certifications” section of the CV, they described themselves as a “RICS Member” when, in fact, they are not a qualified member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) at all.

Update received from RICS

I received an email back from RICS on 30 April 2026.

The email contained just one line of information about their investigation:

“I can confirm I have contacted Mrs X and the designations have now been removed and/or corrected.”

That was it.

What happens now?

From the wording of the email, I can only assume that no further action is being taken.

This is despite the fact that:

1. Clients may have instructed this firm on the understanding that this individual was significantly more qualified than they actually were.
2. Potentially hundreds of expert witness reports may now be in circulation containing qualifications and designations that this individual does not actually hold.
3. These inaccuracies do not appear to be innocent mistakes.
4. An expert witness claiming qualifications they do not actually possess would clearly be misleading to all parties involved including the court.
5. This appears to be a very clear and very blatant breach of RICS rules.

And yet, the apparent outcome is simply that the wording has now been “corrected”.

That raises some fairly obvious questions about enforcement, accountability, and whether the current regulatory approach is acting as any real deterrent at all.

Doctor?

I wish this was a single isolated incident. However, there are at least two examples of this that I am aware of.

To avoid confusion later on, I thought I would deal with both of these at the same time.

Both of these individuals claim to be experts in building pathology. Both claim to have PhDs.

Person A

This individual works as an expert witness. I had the misfortune of seeing a few of his reports a few years ago.

This individual claims to have a BSc, MSc, and PhD. When giving evidence, he said that he did all of these degrees consecutively.

He provided a copy of his alleged PhD certificate to my client and this was later passed on to me. The document is clearly a fake and a forgery.

A few key points:

• The PhD was apparently awarded in October 1993. This individual was born in May 1969. This would mean that he had completed his BSc, MSc, and PhD by age 24. Extremely unlikely, if not impossible. All 3 degrees would take a minimum of 7 years to do full time.
• The document was apparently signed by Vice-Chancellor Vincent Watts in 1993. However, that clearly didn’t happen as Vincent Watts didn’t actually become Vice-Chancellor until 1997.
• The name of the university campus is spelt wrong.
• The name of the degree on the certificate makes no sense whatsoever. A PhD is a research degree and not a taught degree.
• The two universities that would hold the records responded to my client in writing, and I’ve seen both of the letters. They confirmed that they have checked their records and found no record of this individual anywhere. If there was to be a final nail in the coffin, that would be it.

For the craic, I decided to get ChatGPT to make a fake degree certificate. All this took was a quick Google Images search to find a genuine degree certificate from that period. Handing that to ChatGPT, and about 60 seconds worth of prompting later, this was the result. What do you think?

Person B

You’ll occasionally find this person on LinkedIn being extremely vocal about everyone else’s qualifications. Where I’m from, we call that “giving it the biggun”. Anyway, it turns out their qualifications aren’t much to write home about either.

They claim to have a PhD in building pathology.

The university that apparently awarded this degree is one that I had never heard of. So I decided to do a bit of digging.

It turns out this university isn’t actually a university at all. It’s based overseas, with a peculiar chain of shell companies, and isn’t recognised as a university even in its country of origin.

I managed to find this organisation’s Wikipedia page. This is an excerpt which has been translated from German.

“On its website, it states that it does not have state accreditation as a higher education institution and that the “degrees” it awards are not recognised academic degrees. Rather, the titles awarded are intended to give “graduates” the opportunity to have their practical and personal skills acquired outside of higher education certified in the form of an academic-looking diploma. [5]

The institution gained notoriety in German-speaking countries in 2021 after it became known that politician [redacted] had obtained a purported doctorate from [redacted] in March 2020 as part of a doctoral program lasting only three months, and subsequently appeared in public with the academic title “Dr.” until the affair was exposed. [6]”

A quick look on the organisation’s website and it is obvious this is not a proper university or PhD.

Final thoughts

I don’t care if someone has a PhD or not. To be honest, it doesn’t impress me. Titles are just titles. I take each person I meet as I find them.

But if you are going to call yourself “Dr”, at least have an actual PhD from a genuine university. If you don’t, you just look a bit silly.

NB. Both of these individuals are members of RICS and have been reported. Let’s see if anything happens!

Another message from RICS

I saw an excellent article in the Built Environment Journal this week. It’s worth reading the entire thing, and if you want to, you can find it here.

A few key highlights worth noting:

• “RICS had received numerous concerns from various tribunals over the conduct of experts”

• “the standards of reports and members’ conduct has been very concerning.”

• “surveyors using pre-formatted reports, including those prepared by others, e.g. support staff, non-trained surveyors, non-regulated surveyors or designated experts.”

• “surveyors have been found to be accepting success-based fees for serving as expert witnesses, which is in strict breach of RICS rules.”

• “Poor-quality evidence has in my experience been a common occurrence in recent years”

All of this aligns with my own experience.

What’s happening in our industry isn’t even a secret at this point. Everyone knows what’s going on, but nothing is happening.

Ubi sunt sanctiones?

Given that RICS are acutely aware of what’s going on, you would think this would be reflected in the sanctions.

I had an AI agent trawl through all of the published disciplinary outcomes on the RICS website to understand who is being sanctioned and for what.

The results are in. A total of 214 disciplinary outcomes were published between April 2021 to April 2026.

You can guess what’s coming, can’t you? Not a single one of these sanctions relates to an expert witness.

I don’t understand how that is possible to reconcile. If everyone knows that people are doing this stuff, then why is no one being sanctioned for it?

And what message is this sending? Breaking the law and serious breaches of RICS rules is not a priority. But fail to record your CPD on time and you’ll be gone.

Absolutely crazy.

I am happy to name this particular individual. However, there is not much point. This will be in the public domain soon enough.

More importantly, this is not really about a specific person.

This is about a system that is clearly open to abuse. If nothing else, I hope this post gets people thinking. Is our current system actually fit for purpose?

Timeline

This individual became an Associate Member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) on 17 January 2020.

A relatively short time later, they became a Chartered Member of RICS on 3 June 2021.

Then, just 18 months after that, they became a Fellow of RICS on 26 January 2023.

That progression alone should raise questions.

So how did this happen?

RICS state on their own website that Fellowship is only open to those who have been Chartered Members for a minimum of 5 years.

This individual managed it in around 18 months.

So how is that possible?

The answer appears to sit in their own guidance.

The RICS Fellowship application guide, dated February 2021, explains that applicants who do not meet the 5 year requirement can still apply for Fellowship.

The application is then individually reviewed by the “RICS World Regional Board.”

I have to admit, I had never heard of the “RICS World Regional Board”, but it certainly sounds exclusive, whatever it is.

In practical terms, this means that the 5 year requirement is not really a requirement at all. It can be bypassed.

All that seems to be needed is a special dispensation from RICS, followed by a written application setting out how accomplished the applicant is.

That is, apparently, enough.

Removal of Fellowship

This individual was also a Fellow of the Chartered Association of Building Engineers (CABE).

I was recently informed that CABE has sanctioned this member for misconduct, and that one of those sanctions was stripping them of their Fellowship.

You would not know this, though.

There is no mention of it in the Building Engineer Journal, and nothing has been published on CABE’s website yet. The only way I was able to confirm it was by contacting CABE directly and asking why this person is no longer a Fellow.

This raises an obvious question.

Should the details of a member’s sanction be made public, and quickly? I would say yes.

The removal of someone’s Fellowship is not a minor issue. It is clearly something that prospective clients would want to know. The quicker that information can be made public, the better.

At the time of writing, this individual is still a Fellow of RICS. Will RICS will follow suit? We will have to see.

What this says about the system

This is not about one individual slipping through the cracks.

It is about a system that allows it to happen in the first place, and then fails to deal with it transparently afterwards. This is not the only time something like this has happened either.

There is clearly room for improvement here.

At the very least, there needs to be greater transparency around sanctions, and that information needs to be made publicly available, and made available quickly.

Until that happens, people will continue to operate in a system where consequences are either delayed or invisible.

And that is a problem.