You don’t need a law degree to run a building project — but knowing which laws sit behind your contract changes how confidently you handle deposits, defects and disputes. This pillar maps the framework in plain English: what each statute does, when it applies, and how long you have. It covers England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland differ in places.
The Consumer Rights Act 2015: your everyday protection
For any building work you commission as a consumer, the law writes terms into the contract whether or not anything is on paper:
- the work must be done with reasonable care and skill;
- if no price was fixed, you pay only a reasonable price;
- if no timescale was fixed, the work must be done in a reasonable time;
- things the trader said that you relied on — “that beam won’t need building control”, “we always include making good” — are treated as binding terms.
The primary remedy for substandard work is repeat performance: the trader fixes it at their own cost, in reasonable time, without significant inconvenience. If they can’t or won’t, you’re entitled to a price reduction — which in practice is the legal basis for paying someone else to correct the work and claiming the cost. The Act also polices small print: under its unfair terms rules, one-sided clauses (unlimited cancellation fees, “no liability for anything” wording) simply don’t bind you.
The Defective Premises Act 1972: the fitness backstop
Anyone who takes on work “for or in connection with the provision of a dwelling” — builders, developers, architects, engineers — owes a statutory duty that the work is done in a workmanlike or professional manner, with proper materials, so the dwelling is fit for habitation when complete. It bites on serious matters: structural failure, pervasive damp, dangerous services. Crucially, the duty is owed not just to the person who commissioned the work but to later owners — which is why it matters when you’ve bought a house with a botched conversion you never contracted for.
The Building Safety Act 2022: longer memories
The BSA transformed time limits for Defective Premises Act claims: 15 years for work completed after 28 June 2022, and a retrospective 30 years for work completed before it. A defective 2005 loft conversion that would have been long out of time under the old six-year rule may now be actionable. The Act also extended prosecution windows under the Building Act 1984 — the regime behind building control enforcement.
Contract, negligence, and which to use
Most claims against your own builder run in contract (six years from the breach — usually completion of the defective work; twelve if the contract was signed as a deed). Negligence matters when contract is unavailable: claims against professionals, damage discovered late (the Latent Damage Act allows three years from when you could have known, capped by a 15-year longstop), or defects in work someone else commissioned. The routes overlap; the dispute guides in this series cover picking between them.
| Route | Typical time limit |
|---|---|
| Contract (simple) | 6 years from breach |
| Contract (deed) | 12 years from breach |
| Negligence | 6 years from damage, or 3 from knowledge |
| Defective Premises Act | 15 years (30 retrospective) |
CDM 2015: the duties you didn’t know you had
The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations apply to all building work, including domestic jobs. The good news: as a domestic client your duties transfer automatically — to the contractor on a single-contractor job, or the principal contractor where there’s more than one. What remains worth knowing: on notifiable jobs (over 30 working days with 20+ workers, or 500 person-days) a formal notification applies, and if you directly engage and coordinate multiple trades yourself, you can drift into carrying client duties in fact. Our project-management guides cover staying on the right side of that line.
Enforcement by the council
Building control failures have their own regime under the Building Act 1984 — including notices requiring non-compliant work to be altered or removed, and prosecution of those who carried it out. If you’re on the receiving end (often after buying a house with unauthorised work), regularisation and indemnity insurance are usually the practical fixes; the enforcement guide in this series covers the formal process. Planning breaches run under a separate regime — see our planning permission guides.
Using this in real life
Statutes are leverage, not first resorts. The practical order remains: raise it, document it, escalate formally, and let the legal framework above decide how hard you can push and for how long. The detailed law guides in this series — the CRA 2015 in depth, the DPA 1972, the Building Safety Act, limitation periods, CDM for domestic clients, unfair terms, and materials ownership — publish over the coming weeks and will be linked from this page.
This guide is general information for homeowners in England and Wales, not legal advice on a specific dispute.
