Gone are the days when the once iconic London home service company had engineers at the ready 24-hours a day. Call them with a plumbing emergency at 11pm nowadays and you get a third-party call centre insisting they are fully booked for the night, but an engineer will be available sometime between 8am and 2pm tomorrow. Fat lot of good that is when you’ve got water gushing throw your ceiling, or the toilets at your restaurant are backed up.

The next reason why Pimlico Plumbers V2.0 fails to live up to the quality and standards of the original product that was honed over decades of service to customers is all about the new business model. The van may look the same and the uniform still carries the company logo, but the engineer at the wheel, wearing the clobber, is a franchisee who is paying for the right to lay claim to a reputation they have no interest in maintaining. As long as the work and money flow in the tradesmen and women on the street and the US owned executives are happy.

The problem, or should I say the main problem here, is that once you (as the brand owner) sell a franchise, in this case Pimlico Plumbers, you have far less control over who turns up to a job with, or instead of the franchise holder. I’m sure it’s not a huge stretch to see how this system Vs one where the engineer arriving at your door works solely for the badge on their shirt, and if their standards fall, they face being dropped from the team, just like a number 9 on a 10-match goalless run.

Throw into the mix a standard 45% markup on parts supplied; long and frustrating waiting ‘on hold’ to make a booking, and some examples of scandalous day-rate pricing that make Dick Turpin seem like a prince, and it is no surprise that 70% of WEFIX London’s business is coming from disaffected former Pimlico Plumbers customers.