“I’ll sue them for negligence” is the phrase every angry homeowner reaches for, and in building cases it’s usually the wrong tool pointed at the right target. English law splits building claims between two tracks with different rules, different clocks and different defendants. Choosing correctly is half the battle; here’s the map.
Contract: the default against your builder
Where you hired them, the claim is for breach of contract, the express terms plus everything the Consumer Rights Act implies: reasonable care and skill, price, time. Contract recovers the full expectation: the cost of putting the work right, plus consequential losses. Six years from the breach, procedural route via the normal escalation. Simple, complete, and why every guide in this series pushes the paperwork: the contract is the claim.
Negligence: powerful, but allergic to defects
Negligence (a duty of care, breached, causing loss) has a rule that surprises everyone: in construction, the courts treat the cost of repairing the defective work itself as “pure economic loss”, and pure economic loss is generally not recoverable in negligence from a builder. The defective extension is, legally, just a bad bargain; bad bargains are contract’s business (this is the Murphy v Brentwood line of authority, in one sentence).
What negligence does reach:
- Damage to other property and injury to people, the badly-fixed tank that ruins the (separate) original house contents; the collapsing wall that hurts someone. Fully claimable in negligence, including by people with no contract at all, the visiting relative, the neighbour.
- Professional advice, below.
- Statutory routes sit outside both tracks: the Defective Premises Act recovers repair costs for habitability-level defects without any contract, which is precisely why it matters.
Where negligence earns its keep: the professionals
Surveyors, engineers, architects and valuers give advice and design, and negligent advice causing financial loss is the classic professional negligence claim (a special carve-out from the economic loss rule for negligent statements relied upon). The survey that missed the subsidence; the engineer’s beam that was undersized; the architect’s detail that couldn’t keep water out. You’ll often have a contract with these professionals too (claim in both, in the alternative), but negligence extends to some non-clients who foreseeably relied, and professionals carry the professional indemnity insurance that makes judgments collectable. The standard is the competent professional of that discipline, proven by an expert of the same discipline.
The late-discovery zone
The second reason negligence exists in your toolkit: time. Contract dies six years from the work; negligence runs from damage, and the Latent Damage Act adds three years from discovery with a 15-year longstop. Defects surfacing in years 7–15 are routinely pleaded in negligence against the professionals in the chain (design and advice claims fit the rule) even though the identical complaint against the builder would fail the economic-loss test. It’s untidy, it’s the law, and it’s why “who can I still sue?” late in the day needs a solicitor’s hour rather than a guess.
Choosing in practice
Your own recent builder, defective work → contract. Someone else’s builder, serious defects → DPA. A professional’s bad advice or design → professional negligence (plus contract if they were yours). Physical damage beyond the works, or injury → negligence against whoever caused it. Old defects → limitation analysis first, everything else second. Plead in the alternative where routes overlap, the law lets you, and the construction law pillar shows the whole board.
This guide is general information for homeowners in England and Wales, not legal advice.
