The architect will not certify. What can I do?

The instinct is to wait, chase politely, wait again, because nothing can happen without the certificate. That instinct is wrong in your favour, and it is worth understanding exactly why.

The machinery does not run on certificates

On a job the Construction Act covers, payment runs on dates: the due date, the payment notice window, the final date. The certificate matters because it usually is the payment notice under section 110A, served within five days of the due date. But when no certificate appears, the dates do not pause out of respect. The due date passed anyway, the five days passed anyway, and the situation has become the one this series already covers: the payer stayed silent.

From there, two routes, same as ever: if your application was made under the contract, stating the sum and basis, it can stand as the notice and your figure becomes the notified sum. If not, serve the payee notice under section 110B yourself. Either way, a sum becomes payable in full by the final date unless a valid pay less notice arrives, and no certificate is required for any of it.

Why certifiers go quiet, and why it changes little

Sometimes it is a valuation dispute in disguise, sometimes the client told them to sit on it, sometimes the file is simply at the bottom of a pile. The reason matters for the relationship; it barely matters for the money, because the machinery above runs the same in all three cases. The one thing worth doing is asking, once, in writing: it flushes out a real objection, which you answer with evidence, or it documents the silence, which the notices then use.

What to do, in order

1. Confirm your application was made under the contract: right day, right addressee, sum and basis stated. This is what everything else stands on, see is my invoice an application.

2. Write once to the certifier, copying the client: valuation submitted on X, no certificate or notice received, please issue by Y.

3. Run the dates, not the correspondence: the section 110B notice if needed, then the final date. Unpaid after that, and the remedies are the usual ones, interest, suspension on seven days notice, and adjudication under section 108, where a persistent refusal to certify honest work tends to fare badly.

On a job for someone living in the house

All of the machinery above belongs to the Act, and the Act does not apply to a contract with a residential occupier (section 106). On a domestic job run by an architect, the certificate means what the contract says and there is no section 110B to fall back on. Your route is the contract itself and, if the money is real and the silence continues, a letter before action against the client, because the architect’s silence does not extinguish the client’s payment obligation.

Where the information stops

Whether your application carried the force this page assumes, and whether the certifier’s conduct has crossed into something the client answers for, are judgement calls on the documents. Before adjudicating over a missing certificate, spend an hour with a construction solicitor with the contract and the correspondence in front of you.