UK Construction and Law
Application for payment that named only a work order was no payment notice at all
By Staff Writer | 15 August 2026
An application giving a work order reference, and neither a purchase order number nor the identifiers the payer needed to check it, failed the contract's own requirements and so was not a payment notice under the construction payment legislation.
Netomnia Limited v MJ Quinn Integrated Services Limited [2026] EWHC 1824 (TCC) was decided by Mr Justice Eyre and handed down on 24 July 2026. Any subcontractor that submits applications in bulk should read it before the next cycle.
The parties worked under a master services agreement dated 7 April 2021, a framework under which the network operator called off services from the contractor: laying fibre, forming chambers underground, and similar work carried out for the most part in the highway. An application triggered a duty on the payer to respond with a payment notice, and then to pay the notified sum within 14 days unless it had served a pay less notice not less than one day beforehand.
What the application said, and what it left out
On 5 February 2026 the contractor sent an application for £3,770.84. It was one of 168 applications sent that day in a similar format, in sums totalling just over £4.717m. The application gave the reference of Work Order WO 0079. It gave no purchase order number, no polygon identification number and no feature identification number.
The payer refused to pay and said the application was invalid. The contractor referred the dispute to adjudication and won. By a decision of 30 March 2026 the adjudicator, Paul Jensen, found the application valid and the payer's responding payment notice late, and awarded £3,794.60, being the application sum with interest.
The payer then brought a Part 8 claim. It was common ground that the court would decide the validity question unconstrained by the adjudicator's view.
The contract's own checklist
Clause 6.5 required an application to detail the sum considered due and the basis of calculation, to break down the activities performed, to be accompanied by such documentation and other information as might reasonably be required to verify the accuracy of the invoice, and to reference the corresponding purchase order.
The argument turned on the last two limbs. Was it reasonable to require the polygon and feature identifiers, and had a corresponding purchase order been supplied that could have been referenced?
What was reasonably required is to be determined having regard to the general run of applications. The Claimant was right to say that it was entitled to require the information which would normally be necessary to verify the sums claimed.
Mr Justice Eyre, High Court of Justice, Technology and Construction Court
The reasoning is practical rather than technical. The contractor had received more than 200 work orders, most relating to more than one polygon, so a search against a work order reference would not have told the payer which items were being claimed. The payer's own systems used the feature identifiers to find the polygon, the polygon to find the purchase order, and the purchase order to authorise payment.
Then there was the clock. The payment notice had to follow within five days of the due date, the final date for payment fell 14 days after it, and any pay less notice had to be served no later than a day before that. A payer with 168 applications to check in the same window, at an average of the order of £28,000 each, cannot conduct an archaeology exercise against a work order number.
The purchase order and the estoppel
On the second limb the court found that purchase order PO-008324 was the corresponding purchase order, sent to the contractor within days of the work order being agreed and more than two years and five months before the application. The contractor's own staff had not acted on the purchase orders they received, and had not told the payer they were being ignored.
An argument based on estoppel by convention failed on the evidence. To run it, the contractor had to show a practice of the payer paying applications that gave a work order number and nothing else. It did not begin to do so.
An application that wins in adjudication has not been held valid. It has been held valid for now, by a decision a Part 8 claim can revisit within weeks.
The conclusion was that the application did not comply with clause 6.5 and was therefore not a payment notice for the purposes of section 110B(4) of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996.
The lesson is not about fibre networks. A bespoke payment clause listing what an application must contain is a set of conditions, and a payer who drafted one and built its systems around it can insist on it. Bulk applications that strip out the references are an efficiency for the sender and a defence for the recipient.