UK Construction and Law

Seven companies put rescue proposals to creditors while the group fights the building liability order that reached them

By Staff Writer  |  13 August 2026

An insolvency process and the Building Safety Act group liability regime are now running against each other in the same corporate group, with the Court of Appeal due to decide how far a liability order can travel.

Seven companies in a London contracting and property group have put company voluntary arrangement proposals to their creditors. The proposals would set an agreed timetable for repaying debts and allow the companies to keep trading rather than follow the group's main contracting businesses into administration. The seven are Ardmore Group Holdings, Ardmore Group, Byrne Properties, Celebration Homes, Paddington Construction, Systemhaven and Byrne Estates (Kensal Green).

The companies register records what led here. Ardmore Group Limited filed notice of the commencement of a moratorium on 29 June 2026 and a further notice on 20 July that the moratorium had been ended or extended. A moratorium buys temporary protection from creditor action. It does not resolve anything, and when it runs out the company needs a plan.

The debt the group is trying to schedule is the same debt a court has already spread across the group.

What the court did in April

On 1 April 2026 the Technology and Construction Court made two building liability orders under sections 130 and 131 of the Building Safety Act 2022 against seven companies associated with the contractor on a Portsmouth residential development. The contractor entered administration in August 2025. The development comprises eighteen buildings and a twenty one storey tower, built between 2007 and March 2009, and the claim concerns fire safety and other defects.

The first order makes the seven jointly and severally liable for about 14.9 million pounds awarded against the contractor in an adjudicator's decision dated 29 August 2025. The second, described in the judgment as an anticipatory order, makes them jointly and severally liable for any liability the contractor may be found to owe under section 1 of the Defective Premises Act 1972 or as a result of a building safety risk. That second order was made before any such liability had been established at trial.

The associated companies argued that deciding the question before trial was premature, and that a test expressed as what is just and equitable could only be applied after full investigation. The court disagreed on the facts before it. It found a high degree of confidence that the development contains building safety risks and that the contractor will be liable for them, and noted that the associated companies had received letters of claim about a year earlier and had not advanced a positive case denying fitness for habitation.

the purpose of section 130 of the BSA is to provide the Court with powers to allow those directly responsible for defective work which gives rise to a relevant liability for the purposes of the statute to be pursued through their associates

Mr Justice Constable

The judgment also records the finding that will worry any group that has restructured around a problem contract. The court held that the contractor was placed into administration for the benefit of the wider group, with the specific purpose of avoiding the liabilities that Parliament targeted in section 130. It accepted that doing so was lawful business practice, and made the orders anyway.

Why the adjudication limb matters more than the sum

The second question the court answered was whether an adjudicator's decision can be a relevant liability at all for the purposes of section 130. The associated companies said it could not, and that enforcement of the decision was not procedurally before the court in any event, no summary judgment application having been made. The court held that on an application under section 130 it can determine the existence of the liability when deciding whether to transmit it, and concluded that it was just and equitable that each of the seven stand behind the sums owed under the adjudicator's decision.

A temporarily binding decision, reached in twenty eight days on documents, can therefore be carried across a corporate group by court order. Adjudication was built to move money quickly between the parties to a construction contract. It now reaches parties who never signed one.

Permission to appeal was granted in June and the appeal has been expedited. Until the Court of Appeal rules, three questions are open: how confident a court must be about an unproven liability before making an anticipatory order, whether an adjudicator's decision qualifies as a relevant liability, and what weight a group restructuring carries against the company that carried out the work.

For anyone advising a contracting group, the practical point does not wait for the appeal. Letters of claim sent to associated companies were treated as evidence that those companies had their opportunity to answer the case and did not take it. Silence was not neutral. It was counted.