Coventry & Warwickshire Development Partnership v Avison Young: High Court enforces £8.7 million adjudication award

The Technology and Construction Court has granted summary judgement enforcing an adjudicator's award of £8,729,179.33 against Avison Young (UK) Limited, dismissing a series of challenges brought by the property consultancy to resist payment of the sum.

Mr Justice Eyre's judgement concerned a dispute over Avison Young's role as NEC project manager and supervisor on the Gateway South development in Coventry, a 215-acre former sewage treatment site being converted into an industrial and logistics park. Coventry & Warwickshire Development Partnership LLP ("CWDP") alleged that Avison Young had failed to exercise proper skill and care when certifying interim payments due to the main contractor, Buckingham Group Contracting Ltd, resulting in substantial overpayment before Buckingham's subsequent insolvency left the shortfall irrecoverable. An adjudicator, Franco Mastrandrea, found in CWDP's favour in February 2026, awarding damages including interest. Avison Young declined to pay and CWDP sought summary judgement to enforce the decision.

Avison Young's principal defence was that the adjudicator had exceeded his jurisdiction by conducting what amounted to his own valuation exercise rather than determining whether the company had breached its contractual duties and, if so, what loss flowed from that breach. The court rejected this characterisation. Applying the well-established principle that an adjudicator who answers the right question in the wrong way remains within jurisdiction, whereas one who answers a different question does not, Mr Justice Eyre found that the adjudicator had correctly identified the dispute as one of professional negligence and had structured his analysis, however interwoven with valuation detail, around whether Avison Young's conduct fell below the required standard and what loss resulted. A related argument, drawing on the Court of Appeal's decision in Bratt v Jones and the earlier Merivale Moore principle applicable to professional valuers, that the adjudicator ought first to have determined whether the certified sums fell outside a reasonable range before considering breach, was also dismissed as going at most to the correctness of the decision rather than to jurisdiction.

The court likewise rejected the contention that the adjudicator had failed to give adequate reasons, finding that his decision, read as a whole rather than through isolated passages, made clear both his conclusions and the basis for them.

A significant part of the challenge concerned the adjudicator's reliance on a termination account prepared by Gardiner & Theobald, used to calculate the proportion of work completed where the parties' own experts disagreed. Avison Young argued this amounted to the adjudicator deciding the case on a basis neither party had advanced, without a fair opportunity to respond. The judgement found otherwise: correspondence during the adjudication showed the adjudicator had flagged the document's potential relevance, invited submissions, and offered a further meeting, with Avison Young providing substantive submissions on the point before the decision was made. Similar arguments concerning the adjudicator's treatment of retention monies and unidentified defects in Buckingham's work were also dismissed, the court characterising the adjudicator's approach as an ordinary and fair exercise of partially accepting each side's arguments rather than an unheralded departure from the issues canvassed.

Having failed on jurisdiction and natural justice, Avison Young's fallback argument that discrete elements of the decision, particularly the retention finding, should be severed from the balance of the award also failed. The court held severance was inappropriate where the reasoning formed a continuous and connected chain, and observed that what was really sought was a recalculation of the award rather than the removal of a self-contained element. Summary judgement was granted in CWDP's favour in full.