A defect has appeared a year after handover. Am I still liable?

Sort out the two clocks first, because the trade conflates them daily. The rectification period, six or twelve months, is a retention-and-return mechanism: it governs when the schedule of defects arrives, your right to go back and fix, and when the last money releases. Liability is a different, longer animal: work not done in accordance with the contract is a breach, and the client can sue for breach for as long as the limitation rules allow, generally six years from the breach on an ordinary signed contract, twelve where the contract was executed as a deed, which is one very practical reason to notice how the contract you sign is executed. Hidden defects can complicate the clock further, and residential work carries its own statutory duty (the Defective Premises Act) with its own timeline. The exact arithmetic on any real claim is adviser territory; the working message is simpler: the tail is years long, and the defects period was never the end of it.

Defect, wear, or neither: the old test, older

Distance does not change the definition: liability is for work not in accordance with the contract, and eighteen months of living in a building generates plenty that is not that, wear, misuse, no maintenance, movement a building normally does, other trades’ later work. The sorting page applies unchanged; what changes with time is evidence: causation gets harder to establish in both directions, which is why the job records, and the photos of what you covered up, become the whole conversation.

How to answer the call

Take it seriously and go and look. Not because every late complaint is valid, but because the inspection visit is cheap, the information is valuable, and the relationship, and its referrals, often survives on the strength of that one response. Then respond in the sorted, written way: genuinely yours, fix it, your own repair remains the cheapest settlement there is, the same economics as inside the defects period, just without the contractual right of return, so the offer is now your negotiating asset rather than your entitlement. Not yours, say so, with reasons, in writing. Arguable, say what an independent look would settle. What kills firms here is neither honest fixing nor honest refusal, it is the ignored call that matures into a letter before action with a premium contractor’s repair quote attached.

The insurance question, asked once

Late defect claims are where builders discover what their policies never covered: public liability responds to damage your work causes, not to the cost of redoing the defective work itself, and the products built for long-tail structural risk, latent defects insurance, were bought at the start or not at all. Where design is in the frame, your professional indemnity, if maintained, is the relevant call, and the insurance map is worth re-reading the day a serious late claim lands, before you say anything generous in writing.

What to do this week

1. Fix your archive habit: every finished job’s contract, drawings, variations and photos kept findable for the long tail, because the firm that can show what was agreed wins these conversations.

2. Note how your contracts are executed, signature or deed, and price the twelve-year tail into what you sign as a deed knowingly.

3. If a late claim is live now, inspect, sort, respond in writing, and involve your insurer early where design or damage is alleged, late notification is its own way to lose cover.

Where the information stops

Limitation arithmetic on real facts, when the clock started, what a hidden defect does to it, which statutory duties run alongside, is genuinely technical, and both overpaying on a stale claim and blowing off a live one are expensive; a late claim with real money attached goes to a construction solicitor with the archive box, which is the last sentence of this series and the reason the archive box exists.