Subcontractors Blueprint

You're five months into a fast-paced commercial fit-out. You've applied for £85,000, including £12,000 of retention you're entitled to under your subcontract.
The main contractor pays £62,000. No retention release.

Their reason: the retention clause says it's held until the employer issues a certificate under the main contract.

That clause is void. It has been since 2011!

Section 110(1A) of the Construction Act prevents payment from being conditional on obligations under a different contract. Your subcontract and the main contract are two separate agreements. The employer's certificate has no place in your payment mechanism.

You can challenge it. Re-issue the application. The law is on your side.

Episode 140 of The Subcontractors Blueprint covers this in full.

I think suspension of works is the most powerful payment lever in your JCT contract for getting an overdue payment. I've watched contractors move fast the moment that notice lands.

Termination looks decisive. It isn't. It's also incredibly easy to get wrong!

The moment you terminate, you lose all future turnover from that contract. You leave a part-finished job behind. And if you've done it wrong, you're in breach — not them.

The court's position on this is clear: use the tools already built into the contract first.

You have three: the right to interest on late payments, the right to suspend works, and the right to adjudicate.

The suspension right is the one with teeth.

If you haven't been paid seven days past the due date, you serve a notice that day. Not the following week. That day. The notice tells them: pay within seven days or we pull off.

Nobody wants to be the contractor who caused the programme to fail. That notice puts the decision in their hands — and most of the time, they find the money quickly.

What you cannot do is walk off site without serving that notice first. That's not suspension. That's abandonment. And it puts you in breach.

This week I've broken down four recent cases in Episode 139 - Case Law Coffee Break. Tune in for Four Rulings That Shape Your Payment Rights

£180,000 applied for. £40,000 paid. No pay-less notice served. The contractor had to pay the full amount.

Under the HGCRA 1996, that contractor was required to pay the full notified sum.

The work wasn’t finished. There was a live dispute about what it was worth. None of that mattered.

Because the mechanism isn’t about what the job is worth — it’s about what was applied for and whether the correct notice was served to challenge it.
This is the smash-and-grab adjudication route.

The paying party has a defined window to serve a payment notice and then a pay-less notice. Miss the deadline — or serve a notice that’s missing the required breakdown — and the notified sum becomes the amount due. All of it.
S&T v Grove confirmed it. Pay the notified sum first. If they want to argue the true value was lower, they do that in a subsequent adjudication — after the cash has moved.

But it only works if your application was right in the first place.

If your application doesn’t clearly state the sum and the basis of calculation — if it’s vague, or references last month’s figure without a proper breakdown — the mechanism falls apart before the argument even starts.

Your application needs to work as a statutory payment notice. Fully calculated. Sum stated. Breakdown traceable.

Know your payment cycle dates. Know when the pay-less window closes. When it closes without a valid notice — don’t wait and see.

Adjudicate. The statutory right is there. The decision can come in 28 days. And the cash moves before anyone argues about value.

That’s the mechanism. It exists. It rarely gets used.

The Subcontractors Blueprint — wherever you get your podcasts.

When I put this episode together, one thing stood out. The same scenario. Different subcontractors. Different projects. Same outcome. A financial cap that was there in black and white — and cost them anyway.

Letters of intent vary enormously in what they actually cover. And that variation is where the danger lives.

You might feel protected having one. But that protection has limits — and they tend to show up at the worst possible moment.

No rules on how to value variations. Payment terms that are silent or ambiguous. And a financial cap that stops dead the moment you've spent past it, whether the formal contract arrived or not.

This isn't a hypothetical. The TCC, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court have all heard versions of this story. Every single time, the lesson is the same.
The Supreme Court put it plainly: agree first, start work later.

The construction industry doesn't work that way. Which means if you're going to work under a letter of intent — and at some point, you probably will — you need to understand exactly what it is, what it isn't, and where the traps are.

Because the cap is real. Courts enforce it. And you can't spend past it on the assumption that a formal contract will follow and pick up the difference.

Episode 137 of The Subcontractors Blueprint covers exactly this — what letters of intent actually mean commercially, and what to do before you mobilise on the back of one.

“Can’t” doesn’t cost you the attempt. It costs you the ambition.

Michael Phelps had one rule drilled into him from a young age.

Remove the word can’t from your vocabulary. Completely.

Not because everything is easy. Not because failure doesn’t exist. But because the moment you say can’t — you’ve already made the decision. The race is over before you’ve laced your boots.

Phelps went on to do things people hadn’t dreamt of. Or were too afraid to dream of.

That second part is the one that should hit you.
Too afraid to dream of.

In construction, I see this all the time. Subbies who don’t tender for the bigger contract. Don’t hire the extra person. Don’t push into a new sector. Not because they tried and it didn’t work — but because they ruled it out before they even picked up the pen.

That’s what “can’t” does. It doesn’t just stop the attempt. It kills the ambition quietly, long before any decision gets made.

You’ll never know what you were capable of if you talk yourself out of it first.

So this week — what’s the thing you’ve been calling impossible? -The contract. -The hire. -The next level.

Is it actually impossible? Or have you just not removed “can’t” from the conversation yet? Drop it below. 👇