The job is finished and the client has gone quiet

Rule one: stop multiplying soft chases. The fourth friendly text teaches the client that ignoring you is free. From here, everything you send is a step on a ladder, and each step has a date on it.

First, read your own paperwork

What the silence means depends on what was in play when it started:

• You applied for payment and heard nothing at all. On a job the Construction Act covers, silence has a price for them: no payment notice and no pay less notice can leave your application standing as the notified sum, payable in full by the final date (section 111). The mechanics are on the silent client page.
• The sum is certified or agreed, and simply unpaid. Then there is nothing left to argue and the debt is clean: the question is only collection.
• Nothing was ever formalised, a handshake job with a final invoice. The invoice plus your records of the work is your evidence; the ladder below still works, it just leans on the contract and the paperwork rather than the Act.

Then check the debtor still exists

Two minutes on the Companies House register: is the company still active, has it filed anything alarming, is a strike-off pending? A client who has gone quiet because the company is dying is a different problem with different urgency, covered in the client who disappears mid-job; if a formal insolvency has actually begun, the whole payment cycle changes from that event. For an individual, silence plus a house they still live in is usually tactics, not flight.

The ladder

Step one, the schedule letter: one page. Work complete on [date], sum outstanding, how it is made up, payments received, and a deadline fourteen days out. Post and email. No adjectives.

Step two, the letter before action: the formal pre-action step, with interest stated accurately for who the debtor is. On a consumer debt the protocol gives the homeowner thirty days to respond, so build that into the plan rather than resenting it.

Step three, the forum: a business client on an Act job can be taken to adjudication (section 108), which turns silence into a decision in about a month. A residential occupier is outside the Act (section 106), so the route is the county court, where an undefended clean debt tends to move quickly precisely because the client never put a complaint in writing.

What to do this week

1. Build the schedule: applied, certified, paid, outstanding, all dated.

2. Send the schedule letter with a fourteen-day deadline, and stop all informal chasing the same day.

3. Diarise the deadline and keep it. A deadline you set and then let pass is worse than none, it proves the threats are decorative.

Where the information stops

If the silence turns out to conceal a real dispute, or the client answers step two with a solicitor’s letter, stop climbing the ladder alone: from that point the file needs an hour of professional advice before the next move, and this page is information about the steps, not advice about your case.