Construction adjudication gives a party to a construction contract the right to a decision within 28 days of referral, but section 106 of the same Act closes that route entirely where the contract principally relates to a home the other party occupies or intends to occupy as their residence.
What adjudication is and where it comes from
Adjudication is a statutory route for resolving disputes on construction contracts, set out in section 108 of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996. A party to a construction contract has the right to refer a dispute arising under the contract for adjudication, and notice may be given at any time. The Act builds a fast timetable around that notice: the appointment of the adjudicator and the referral of the dispute must happen within 7 days of the notice, and the adjudicator must then reach a decision within 28 days of referral.
That 28 day period can run longer only if the parties agree a longer period after the dispute has already been referred, or if the adjudicator extends it by up to 14 days with the consent of the party who referred the dispute. The decision that comes out the other end is binding, but only until the dispute is finally determined by legal proceedings, by arbitration, or by agreement between the parties.
The trap: this is closed to a homeowner’s own home
Section 106 of the same Act says plainly that this part of the Act does not apply to a construction contract with a residential occupier. A residential occupier, for this purpose, is a party to a contract which principally relates to operations on a dwelling which one of the parties occupies, or intends to occupy, as their residence.
In practical terms, if you are a contractor working on a homeowner’s own house, that homeowner has no statutory right to adjudicate a dispute with you, and you have no statutory right to adjudicate against them either, because the contract itself falls outside the Act. Adjudication only exists here if both parties have agreed to it by contract, since the statute has taken the right off the table.
What a homeowner can actually do instead
Where the statutory adjudication route is closed, a homeowner’s dispute over defective or incomplete work still sits inside ordinary consumer and contract law. Section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 treats every contract to supply a service as including a term that the trader performs the service with reasonable care and skill. Where that has not happened, section 55 gives the consumer the right to require the trader to perform the service again to complete it properly, within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience, with the trader bearing the cost of any necessary labour or materials, unless that repeat performance would be impossible.
If repeat performance is not available or has not happened within a reasonable time, section 56 gives the right to require the trader to reduce the price by an appropriate amount instead. Any refund due under that route must be paid without undue delay and in any event within 14 days of the trader agreeing the consumer is entitled to it, using the same means the consumer used to pay, with no fee charged for making it.
Behind all of this sits the general limitation period. Section 5 of the Limitation Act 1980 says an action founded on simple contract cannot be brought after six years from the date the cause of action accrued, so a homeowner is not against an immediate deadline in the way section 108’s 28 days would suggest.
If it ends up in court instead of adjudication
Many domestic building disputes that cannot go to adjudication end up, if unresolved, in the small claims track of the county court in England and Wales. Under Civil Procedure Rules Part 27, that track generally applies to claims not exceeding £10,000. No expert may give evidence, whether written or oral, at a hearing without the permission of the court. The standard directions require each party, at least 14 days before the final hearing, to file and serve on every other party copies of all the documents they intend to rely on at the hearing. The strict rules of evidence do not apply on this track, and the court does not need to take evidence on oath.
This is where the quality of your own record keeping matters, whichever side of the dispute you are on. A clear, dated, room by room and trade by trade record of what was found and when tends to carry more weight than a memory of a conversation. Photographing and describing issues as work progresses, rather than reconstructing a timeline after a dispute starts, is worth doing as routine practice. Apps such as SayScope, built for site visits and snagging, let someone walk a property, photograph and circle each defect, and record what is wrong on the spot, leaving a report grouped by room and by trade that can be produced as one of those documents if a dispute reaches the small claims track.