What is adjudication, and how long does it actually take?

Adjudication exists because of section 108 of the Construction Act: every construction contract the Act covers must give each party the right to refer a dispute to adjudication at any time, and where the contract does not provide a compliant procedure, the Scheme supplies one. You cannot bargain it away, and you do not need the other side’s permission to start.

How it runs, in five steps

1. Notice of adjudication: you tell the other side what the dispute is and what you want. This document defines the battlefield; drafted too wide or too narrow, it haunts the rest.

2. An adjudicator is appointed within days, agreed, or nominated by a body named in the contract, under the Scheme within seven days of the notice.

3. The referral: your case and its documents, served on a tight clock. Then the response, and whatever short exchanges the adjudicator directs.

4. The decision, generally within 28 days of the referral, extendable modestly with consent. Four weeks, start to answer, on a dispute a court would schedule for late next year.

5. It binds immediately. Not forever: it binds until the dispute is finally determined by court, arbitration or agreement, which mostly never happens, the decision simply becomes the answer. The courts enforce decisions robustly on the pay now, argue later principle, so ignoring one is not a strategy.

What it is good at, and what it is not

It was built for payment, and payment disputes are where it shines: unpaid notified sums and missed-notice claims, valuation arguments, stranded retention, deductions without notices, wrongly levied damages. It copes less happily with sprawling multi-issue final accounts and professional negligence, where 28 days is brutal for everyone; those can still be adjudicated, but scope them tightly or expect rough justice.

Is it worth it for your dispute?

The honest calculus has three parts. Costs: each side generally bears its own, win or lose, while the adjudicator’s fee usually follows the loser, the full arithmetic, with what is and is not published, is on the cost of recovery page. So the question is whether your own case-building cost is proportionate to the sum. Evidence: a documented claim is cheap to run, an undocumented one is expensive in any forum, the records page is really the price list. The debtor: a decision against an empty company is a certificate, not money. Where all three line up, a clean five-figure payment dispute against a solvent client, adjudication is usually the answer this series has been pointing at all along.

The mandatory section: the client who lives in the house

None of this exists on a contract with a residential occupier: section 106 disapplies the Act, so there is no statutory right to adjudicate a domestic extension. Two consequences. The route with a homeowner is the letter before action and the county court. And the gap can be closed by agreement: homeowner-oriented contract forms commonly offer adjudication as an optional clause, and ticking it at signing gives both sides the fast forum, the residential occupier page covers the whole landscape.

What to do this week

1. If you are considering referring: assemble the file first, application, notices, certificates, correspondence, and let its condition make the decision honest.

2. If you have received a notice of adjudication: the clock is already running and this is same-week advice territory. Response deadlines in adjudication are days, not weeks, and silence loses.

3. On your next domestic contract, consider the optional adjudication clause, while both sides still like each other.

Where the information stops

Referrals and responses are technical documents where scoping errors are expensive, and this is the one process in the series where professional help, a construction solicitor or claims consultant, is close to standard even for small firms. The file is yours; the drafting, for anything serious, should not be.