Adjudication is the fast statutory dispute process available on UK construction contracts: a party refers a dispute to an independent adjudicator who reaches a decision, typically within 28 days, that is binding unless and until finally resolved by court, arbitration or agreement.
Its speed is the point and the pressure: there is little time to build a case after the referral arrives, so parties effectively fight with the records they already hold.
The right to adjudicate comes from the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 and applies to most construction contracts whether or not the contract mentions it. A party can refer a dispute at any time, which means the timing is chosen by the referring party, not agreed between them. The responding party typically has around seven days to produce a response to a referral that the other side may have spent months preparing.
That asymmetry is the whole game. The referring party picks the moment, frames the dispute and arrives with its evidence assembled. The responding party answers in a week. Nobody reconstructs eighteen months of site history in seven days, so in practice the response is built from whatever records already exist in a usable form.
The decision is binding on a temporary basis: it must be complied with immediately, and it stands unless and until overturned by litigation, arbitration or agreement. In commercial reality most adjudication decisions are never challenged further, because by the time a party could, the money has moved and the relationship has resolved. Treating adjudication as a first round to be tidied up later is a common and expensive misreading.
Adjudicators decide on documents far more often than on witnesses. There is rarely a hearing, almost never live cross-examination, and the timetable does not allow for much investigation. What persuades is a coherent, dated, internally consistent documentary story. What loses is a bundle assembled in a hurry with gaps where the difficult weeks should be.
That reality is the strongest practical argument for contemporaneous record-keeping. In a 28-day process, the party with the organised, dated, searchable project record starts several lengths ahead. The work that wins an adjudication is done in the ordinary weeks of the job, long before anyone contemplates one.
Twenty-eight days is no time to build a record, which is why it has to exist already: see the kind of daily record Construction Metric assembles as the job runs.