Background
Coventry & Warwickshire Development Partnership LLP engaged Avison Young (UK) Limited to act as NEC project manager and supervisor for major reclamation and earthworks at Gateway South in Coventry. The developer alleged that Avison Young failed to exercise reasonable skill and care when certifying interim payments to contractor Buckingham Group Contracting Ltd, including by accepting reduced baseline volumes, relying heavily on excavation data rather than data showing material placed, and failing to identify certain defects. After Buckingham became insolvent, the developer said it could not recover the resulting overpayments.
An adjudicator found that Avison Young had significantly over-certified the Price for Work Done to Date and awarded the developer £8,729,179.33, including interest, as damages. Avison Young refused payment, arguing that the adjudicator had decided a valuation dispute rather than the professional-negligence dispute referred to him, had given inadequate reasons, and had breached natural justice by relying on a Gardiner & Theobald termination assessment and by adopting approaches to retention and defects that neither party had advanced. It alternatively sought severance of parts of the decision.
The Court’s Holding
Mr Justice Eyre granted summary judgment enforcing the adjudicator’s decision. Reading the decision as a whole, the court held that the adjudicator had addressed the dispute actually referred: whether Avison Young failed to perform its duties with the required skill and care and what loss resulted. Although breach, causation, valuation, and loss were interwoven rather than addressed in separate sections, that structure did not transform the exercise into a different dispute.
The adjudicator’s reasons were adequate because they enabled the parties to understand what he had decided and why. Any failure to determine first whether the certified amount fell outside a permissible range was, at most, an error in answering the correct question, not a jurisdictional error that could defeat enforcement.
There was also no material breach of natural justice. The adjudicator had repeatedly identified the possible relevance of the Gardiner & Theobald assessment, explained his thinking, invited submissions, and received detailed responses before relying on it. His treatment of retention and defects permissibly accepted parts of each side’s arguments. Severance was inappropriate because the challenged retention finding formed part of a connected chain of reasoning leading to a single damages award, and recalculating the award would impermissibly recast rather than sever the decision.
Key Takeaways
- An adjudication decision remains enforceable when the adjudicator answers the correct referred question, even if the reasoning or legal approach may be wrong.
- An adjudicator may adopt a position advanced by neither party when the relevant material and issues have been fairly canvassed and the parties have had a meaningful opportunity to respond.
- Severance cannot be used to reverse one component of an adjudicator’s reasoning and recalculate an integrated award in the absence of jurisdictional error or material unfairness.
Why It Matters
The decision reinforces the Technology and Construction Court’s robust “pay now, argue later” approach to adjudication enforcement. Challenges framed as jurisdictional errors, inadequate reasoning, or breaches of natural justice will fail where the decision, viewed substantively and as a whole, resolved the referred dispute through a fair process.
It also illustrates practical limits on natural-justice objections: a party given notice and an opportunity to address material cannot ordinarily defeat enforcement merely because the adjudicator rejects its primary position and uses that material in a previously signalled way.