Adjudication Has Become the Default Route, and Complexity Is Not a Defence

The most common owner-side response to a notice of adjudication has been that the dispute is too complicated for a thirty-day process. In Sayers Foods Ltd. v. Gay Company Ltd. the Divisional Court dismissed a judicial review and held that the complexity of a payer's defences does not remove an adjudicator's jurisdiction, describing the regime as a self-contained statutory scheme intended to keep money moving. The Court also confirmed that the obligation to retain a notice holdback is triggered only by a written notice of lien in the prescribed form, and that allegations of fraud require substantive proof rather than a contractual disagreement.

The amendments in force since 1 January 2026 push in the same direction. The scope of adjudication expanded, private adjudicators are now permitted alongside ODACC, and the annual release of holdback was decoupled from lien expiry through a publication and waiting-period sequence that owners must administer on a fixed calendar.

The volume data makes the point plainly. ODACC reported 324 adjudications commenced in its 2025 reporting year, up seventeen per cent, with an average claim near $635,000 and an average determination near $186,000. Roughly a third of matters settled once commenced. The gap between claimed and determined amounts is the part worth dwelling on: positions that are not supported by contemporaneous records do not survive a compressed process.

Our advice has not changed, only become more urgent. The evidence that decides an adjudication is the evidence that already exists when the notice arrives. Statused monthly updates, a live change and delay register, and agreed rules of credit are what convert a position into a determination.