They say it is faulty, but will not let me back in to fix it

Start from an uncomfortable truth: if the defect is real, fixing it is your job. The argument here is not about dodging that. It is about who does the fixing and at what price, and that is where the refusal changes everything.

Your return is usually a right, not a favour

Standard building contracts give the contractor a period after completion, the rectification or defects liability period, in which defects are notified and the contractor returns to make them good. That mechanism exists because your cost of fixing your own work, materials at trade price, your own labour, is a fraction of what the client pays a stranger to do it. The period and its paperwork have their own page.

What refusing access does to their money

A client’s defect claim is, in principle, for the reasonable cost of putting the work right. A claimant is also expected to act reasonably about their own loss, and courts and adjudicators have little patience for one who inflated it by refusing the cheap fix that was on the table. Turning away the contractor who offered to make good, then claiming a premium price from someone else, invites the obvious question at every later stage: why did you not let them fix it? Sometimes there is a good answer, the relationship has genuinely collapsed, or the botch is beyond trusting you twice. Often there is no answer, just a preference for cash over repair, and that preference reads badly in every forum.

The two letters

Letter one, on receiving the complaint: thank them, take it seriously, and offer inspection and repair with two concrete dates. Ask for access. No argument about whether the items are defects yet, that discussion goes better after you have seen them, and some of the list is usually snagging anyway.

Letter two, if silence or refusal follows: record it. “We offered to inspect and make good on [dates]; you have not provided access. We remain willing to do so. If you engage others, we do not accept that their costs are recoverable where our repair was refused.” One page, no heat.

If the deduction has already been taken from a payment, that side of the argument, notices, timing, the build-up of the number, is covered in deductions for defects, and on jobs the Construction Act covers a deduction without a valid pay less notice fails on paperwork before anyone argues about workmanship.

On a job for someone living in the house

The dynamics are identical on a domestic job, and this is one of the pages where the Act barely matters: the right to return comes from the contract, and the point about inflated costs is general law. What changes is the forum, a residential occupier is outside the Act (section 106), so a dispute that hardens goes through a letter before action and the county court rather than adjudication. Your two letters read just as well to a district judge as to an adjudicator.

What to do this week

1. Send letter one today with two dated offers of attendance.

2. Diarise fourteen days, then send letter two if the silence holds.

3. Keep the account clean: if money is being withheld, deal with it under the deductions page rather than letting the two arguments blur into one shouting match.

Where the information stops

Whether a refusal of access actually reduces what this client recovers on these facts is a judgement call, not a rule you can bank, and a genuinely botched job can justify the client’s refusal. Before you rely on this argument to resist a serious claim, put the file in front of a construction solicitor, this page is the shape of the argument, not an opinion on your case.