Coventry & Warwickshire Development Partnership LLP v Avison Young (UK) Limited
| Court | High Court of Justice, King's Bench Division, Business and Property Courts of England and Wales, Technology and Construction Court |
| Judge | Mr Justice Eyre |
| Judgment date | 15 September 2026, handed down remotely at 10.30am |
| Hearing date | 25 June 2026 |
| Case number | HT-2026-000118 |
| Claimant | Coventry & Warwickshire Development Partnership LLP |
| Defendant | Avison Young (UK) Limited |
| Decision enforced | Adjudicator's decision of 13 February 2026, awarding damages of £8,729,179.33 inclusive of interest |
| Outcome | Every ground of resistance fails. Summary judgment for the Claimant enforcing the decision. Severance refused. |
Summary
An employer engaged a consultancy as project manager and supervisor under an NEC3 contract for earthworks at a logistics park in Coventry. The consultancy certified far more than the contractor had earned, and the contractor's insolvency put the overpayment beyond recovery. An adjudicator found a failure to work to the required standard of skill and care and awarded damages of £8,729,179.33 inclusive of interest.
The consultancy resisted enforcement on inadequate reasons, a decision on a different dispute, natural justice and severance. Every ground failed and the employer had summary judgment.
Background and facts
The site was a 215 acre former sewage treatment plant. The contractor was to excavate, treat and position some 5,000,000 cubic metres of material to form a bund. Payment each month turned on the Price for Work Done to Date, the proportion of each activity properly completed applied to its lump sum. The consultancy certified those sums from January 2020 to January 2023.
The employer said the consultancy accepted reduced baseline volumes with nothing to support them, took the contractor's progress claims at face value while holding information showing less work done, and failed as supervisor to identify defects. The consultancy said its certification was reasonable and any difference negligible. The adjudicator accepted the criticisms, could not safely use either expert's baseline volume, and built his evaluation on a termination account prepared for the employer in March 2024 that both parties had told him to leave alone.
The issue
The consultancy said the adjudicator asked the wrong question. Instead of deciding breach of the duty of skill and care and the loss flowing from it, he had valued the works and called the shortfall damages. No breach could be found, it said, without first deciding that the certified sum fell outside the range a competent project manager could have certified. His use of the termination account, and his partial treatment of retention and defects, were said to break natural justice.
The decision
The reasons were adequate. The passage called a bare statement was the culmination of the analysis before it, and the decision must be read as a whole.
A party who can say in detail how an adjudicator erred will find it hard to show that the reasons given did not enable that party to understand what the adjudicator had decided and why.Mr Justice Eyre, paragraph 53
The adjudicator decided the dispute referred. He stated it correctly, accepted particular criticisms of the certification process, treated the bond and retention as matters going to loss, and tested the alleged defects against what a reasonably competent project manager would have found. That finding cut the employer's defects claim down and showed him separating the overpayment from the consultancy's responsibility for it. Breach, causation and loss were interwoven rather than sequential, which the judge treated as substance not form.
On the range argument, the judge did not decide whether the authorities on negligent valuers reach a project manager certifying under an NEC contract. He held the ground failed even if they do. At their highest the complaints showed the adjudicator answering the right question in the wrong way, an error within his jurisdiction.
The natural justice challenge failed on the correspondence. The adjudicator told the parties he thought the termination account relevant, said how he envisaged using it, offered a meeting and asked for submissions. Both did, at length. He then used it as he had foreshadowed.
It is well-established that an adjudicator is not bound by the contentions of the parties and can reach a conclusion for which neither party has contended provided the parties have had a fair opportunity to address the matters which the adjudicator was considering taking into account.Mr Justice Eyre, paragraph 83
The retention and defects complaints failed more simply. On each he accepted part of one side's case and part of the other's.
It is verging on the fanciful to suggest that either side was unaware of the possibility that its arguments on this point might be accepted in part rather than in whole.Mr Justice Eyre, paragraph 87
Severance failed. Its primary basis went with the natural justice grounds, and what was sought was not the excision of a discrete part of the award but a recalculation of the whole sum on a different view of the retention, one link in a connected chain.
To the extent that the Defendant is saying that the Decision or parts of it were wrong in law then it should have commenced Part 8 proceedings seeking a declaration to that effect.Mr Justice Eyre, paragraph 94
He added, as an alternative he did not need to reach, that he was not persuaded the retention conclusion was wrong. The employer was entitled to summary judgment.
Practical implications
Telling an adjudicator a document is irrelevant is not an answer to his using it. Once he has flagged it and asked for submissions, the party that replies only that he must not touch it has spent its opportunity. Plead the alternative on the figures.
A negligence claim against a certifier can be adjudicated even where the work looks like valuation, so long as the adjudicator keeps the overpayment and the certifier's responsibility for it apart. The finding that cut most of the defects claim down proved the separation here.
The range of reasonable certification argument survives, but it will not carry an enforcement defence. The court left the point open and decided the ground without it.
Practice points
- If an adjudicator raises a document neither party relies on, answer it twice. Say why he should not use it, then say what the numbers become if he does. A bare objection hands him the arithmetic.
- Take up the offer of a meeting. Turning one down and then complaining of unfairness reads badly when the correspondence is put before the court.
- An adjudicator may land between the parties' experts. Accepting part of each side's case is not deciding on a basis nobody argued, and there is no duty to circulate a provisional conclusion for another round of comment.
- The email trail is the record in an enforcement fight. The fairness question here was reconstructed almost entirely from the exchanges between the adjudicator and the parties between mid December and late January.
- A tolerance argument is a reason why there was no breach, not a jurisdictional bar. Advanced as part of the merits, it can be rejected without separate analysis and without making the reasons inadequate.
- Severance asks whether a discrete part of the award can be cut out. Where removing the finding means the whole figure has to be recalculated, it is not severance and the application will fail.
- If your case is that the decision is wrong in law, issue Part 8 proceedings seeking a declaration. Raising it in answer to an enforcement application puts you against the pay now, argue later rule and against paragraph 10.4 of the TCC Guide.