Construction & engineering debt recovery

Milestone payments, retention holdbacks, and variation disputes. We recover what contractors and subcontractors are owed.

HELEN, Commercial director, Manchester. Finished the building. Still waiting for the last 5%. A Riyadh collector reviews the contract with the client. In Arabic. Snagging list: empty. Retention: released.

Construction has a payment culture that would be considered genuinely alarming in any other industry. A subcontractor can complete six months of work, pass every inspection, receive formal sign-off on each milestone, and still wait another year for full payment. This isn't a bug in the system — it's a feature. The construction industry has, over several decades, developed an elaborate architecture of delayed payment that it has somehow convinced itself is normal. Retention clauses, pay-when-paid provisions, final account negotiations that drag on longer than the actual build — these aren't exceptions. They're standard operating procedure.

The numbers are extraordinary. A structural steelwork subcontractor completes £1.2 million of work on a commercial development. Five percent is held as retention: £60,000, locked away for 12 months pending the defects liability period. The period expires. The building is occupied. Tenants are paying rent. The main contractor's commercial team, asked to release the retention, suddenly discovers "ongoing snagging issues" that nobody mentioned during the previous 12 months of apparently satisfactory occupation. The retention remains unreleased.