Practical completion is not the end of the contractor's obligations. For an agreed period afterwards, commonly six or twelve months but whatever the contract says, faults that appear in the completed works are the contractor's to put right.
The mechanism is simple and it is routinely wasted, because almost nobody uses the period the way it is designed to be used.
How it is meant to work
The clock starts at practical completion.
During the period, defects appearing in the works are notified to the contractor, who returns and makes them good at their own cost.
Near the end of the period, the employer or their agent inspects and issues a schedule of defects: one consolidated list rather than a trickle of individual complaints.
Once those are made good, a certificate of making good is issued, and the balance of retention is released.
The mistake almost everybody makes
The period is treated as a warranty that runs quietly in the background, and the inspection at the end never happens.
What that costs: the defects that appear in month three are reported and fixed, because they are annoying. The ones that only become visible in month ten are noticed, tolerated, and never formally raised, because by then the contractor has gone and raising it feels like starting something.
Then the period expires, the retention is released or forgotten, and a list of real faults has quietly become the owner's problem.
Put the inspection in a diary the day practical completion is certified. Two weeks before the period ends. That single diary entry is worth more than the entire clause.
What it is not
It is not the contractor's last chance to be liable. The defects period is a practical mechanism for getting things fixed promptly by the people who built them, while the retention gives them a reason to come. It is not a cut-off after which nothing can ever be raised again. Liability for defective work can survive the period, on a basis that depends on the contract and on the applicable law, and that is a question for advice rather than for a glossary.
It is not a maintenance contract. The contractor is liable for defects, meaning work that was not done properly. They are not liable for wear, for damage caused by use, or for things that have simply reached the end of their life. A door that has been slammed for a year is not a defect.
Writing a defect so it gets fixed
The same discipline that works for a tenant reporting a repair works here:
- Where, precisely. Room, elevation, position.
- What, described as a fault rather than a diagnosis. "Damp patch appearing on the north wall of bedroom 2, about a metre above skirting" rather than "the damp proof course has failed".
- Since when, and whether it is getting worse.
- A photograph, dated.
- Sent in writing, on one thread, so the sequence exists.
What goes wrong
No consolidated schedule. Defects raised one at a time over twelve months never form a list, so nobody can see that eleven of them are the same fault in different rooms.
The certificate of making good is never issued. Which means the retention balance has no trigger and sits unreleased indefinitely, which is unfair to a contractor who did come back and fix things.
The period is never actually started, because practical completion was never certified. See practical completion for why that date matters more than it looks.