The subcontractor walked off and still wants paying

The first move is the uncomfortable one: audit yourself before you audit him. The answer to “where do I stand” depends on where his account stood the day he left.

Question one: was the walk-off actually a suspension?

On a subcontract the Construction Act covers, a subcontractor whose notified sum went unpaid past the final date has a statutory right to suspend work, on seven days written notice (section 112). A suspension is not abandonment: it is a right being exercised, he is entitled to remobilisation time when you pay, and treating it as repudiation, hiring a replacement and back-charging him, can put you in breach, not him. So check, honestly: were his applications answered with notices, and paid? Did anything arrive that reads like a suspension warning? The same machinery you use upwards, described here from the unpaid side, works downwards against you.

If his account was genuinely paid up and no notice ever came, the walk-off is what it looks like, and the rest of this page applies.

Question two: what is his work worth, as left?

He is entitled to be paid for what he properly did before leaving, valued under the subcontract, and that entitlement does not evaporate because the leaving was wrongful. What changes is what stands against it: the reasonable extra cost of completing his package over what you would have paid him, rectifying his defective work, and any delay costs the subcontract passes down. On a half-done package those sums are often larger than the balance he is claiming, which is why the account, not the argument, decides this.

Question three: are you deducting properly?

Here is where main contractors lose winnable positions. Under the Act your payment obligations to the sub run on the same notice machinery you know from above: deducting completion costs from sums otherwise due needs a pay less notice, in time, with the sum and the basis (section 111). Fury is not a notice. A main contractor who simply stops paying, without paper, can lose an adjudication to a sub who walked off, on pure procedure, and it happens constantly. The deduction mechanics are on the contra-charges page.

The sequence

1. Freeze the record: photograph and measure his work as left, list his materials and plant on site, and value the account to that date.

2. Write to him once, formally: the works were left on [date] without notice or lawful ground; the subcontract remains alive until properly ended; invite him to return by a stated date. This letter costs little and protects you if he later claims the leaving was a suspension.

3. If he does not return, follow the subcontract’s termination or completion provisions, then cost the completion with real invoices, not estimates.

4. Serve the notices on any sums you intend to withhold, in time, with the build-up.

If he adjudicates, section 108 works between businesses in both directions, the account you built in steps one and three is the whole defence.

Where the information stops

Whether a walk-off was repudiation, lawful suspension or something messier is exactly the kind of question that turns on the correspondence, and calling it wrong in either direction is expensive: treat a suspension as abandonment and you are the one in breach. Before terminating a subcontract or netting serious money off a final payment, put the file in front of a construction solicitor, one hour, before the letter goes, not after.