The Subcontractors Blueprint

Case Law Coffee Break

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Episode 139 of The Subcontractors Blueprint delivers Jacob Austin's Spring Case Law Coffee Break — a plain-English breakdown of four recent UK construction judgments that directly affect how subcontractors get paid, handle disputes and exercise their contractual rights. Jacob walks through a Supreme Court ruling on JCT termination (Providence v Hexagon), a subcontract payment notice case that cost a main contractor £217,000 (Vision v Jetcraft), an adjudication enforcement fight where the losing party tried every argument going (Musi v Davis), and a cautionary tale about getting the adjudicator nomination form wrong (RDN JM v Purpose Social Homes). Direct, practical, grounded in real contract consequence.

Key Takeaways

  • A payment default that gets cured inside the 28-day window never builds into a right to terminate, which means the JCT "repeated default" shortcut cannot be used unless the earlier termination right actually crystallised, and this same termination wording carries into JCT 2024.
  • Termination is the nuclear option. The contract's other tools -interest, the seven-day right to suspend work, and adjudication - cost nothing to use and almost always force the paying party to move before anyone gets near the termination button.
  • A late payment notice cannot be retrospectively rebranded as a pay-less notice to rescue a missed deadline. The document says what it says, and the court will not rewrite it for you.
  • A consistent pattern of late notices between two parties is not, on its own, a waiver of the contractual deadlines. Sloppiness on both sides does not change the contract, and the payment regime resets every application cycle.
  • The bar for resisting enforcement of an adjudicator's decision on natural justice or jurisdiction grounds is genuinely high. If you have run a clean adjudication, procedural noise from the losing party is rarely going to stop you getting paid.
  • A misstatement on the RICS adjudicator nomination form - even one the court does not decide was deliberate - can lose you summary enforcement. Fill the paperwork out accurately, thoroughly, and exactly, or pay somebody who will.

    • Best Bits

    "Termination is nuclear. It's a drastic step, and it's one that has to be clearly and strictly justified under the contract."

    "The payment regime has real teeth, but only if you're using them."

    "The payment regime resets with every application cycle."

    "The bar for resisting enforcement on natural justice or jurisdiction grounds is really high."

    "If you are going to nominate an adjudicator, fill the bloody forms out right. And if you can't trust yourself to do it, pay somebody to do it for you."

    "Miss the contract detail and the commercial risk falls on you."

    Host Bio

    Jacob Austin is a Chartered Quantity Surveyor with over a decade of experience in UK construction, having worked across education, health, and residential developments from £1,000s to over £300m of concurrent projects with some of the industry's leading contractors. Through The Subcontractors Blueprint podcast and The Subcontractors Blueprint Academy, he's on a mission to give the UK's 1 million SME subcontractors the commercial knowledge they need to protect their margins, manage risk, and build stronger businesses. His approach is direct, practical, and grounded in real contract experience — no theory, no fluff.

    Links

    LinkedIn — www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-austin/ Instagram — www.instagram.com/subcontractorsblueprint/ www.subcontractorsblueprint.uk/all-links

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    The Subcontractors BlueprintBy Jacob Austin