On further investigation, the question divides into two parts:
- Am I required by law to have a contract?
- If not, should I have a contract anyway – or as it’s sometimes expressed: ‘can I get away without one’?
Am I required by law?
I should perhaps start by saying I always find it a little strange that anyone contemplating having expensive construction work carried out should even consider the possibility of not wanting to know precisely what the terms and conditions are. It is always a source of puzzlement that parties to jobs with a value of millions should apparently find the cost of less than £50 for some formal contract documentation to be prohibitive.
There is no overarching ‘legislative’ requirement, in the sense that a general law exists requiring all parties to have a specific type of agreement.
Should I have a contract?
The simple answer is an emphatic ‘yes’. But the truth is that you probably do anyway.
Let us look at what a contract represents. A contract typically will result when one party agrees to do something for another in return for ‘consideration’ – usually expressed in monetary form. Essentially it is simply a set of ‘conditional’ promises: “If Party A does this, then Party B will do that” and so on. The terms of that contract may be many and varied, however. They will reflect the complexity of what is being done, and the method used.
It doesn’t have to be written down, but it certainly helps if it is. If the agreement is verbal, then how do you remember what they were, but even if it’s in writing, are the words free of ambiguity, or could they be interpreted differently by someone else?
If a project ends in dispute, this is one of the first problems the person tasked with sorting it out has to resolve. If you have no record of what’s been agreed, how can you know what to do if something goes wrong?
Summary
If you buy a TV, car, garden shed, or even an existing house, you can usually go and see it and look around before deciding whether to proceed. If, however, you are buying a new building, the chances are you are buying into a concept: a design idea which has yet to be realised. To many Clients, this is a leap of faith; building is not their core business, so they may not have the technical capability to visualise what is being described to them, despite advances in computer models and 3D software.
For the uninitiated, or even the experts, this can be a difficult task. Having a contract and knowing what the terms are at least brings some certainty. So why anyone would want to attempt it without one is a mystery.
Read more Contracts are for wimps: why would I need a (standard) building contract?
by Roland Finch
NBS Technical Author
via NBS
