Sooner or later, a dispute stops moving. The meetings have run out of road, the without prejudice call has not landed, and someone finally says it: "right, what are our options?"
At that point the instinct on most construction projects is to reach for adjudication, because it is quick and because it is there. Sometimes that is exactly right. Often it is not. Adjudication, mediation and arbitration are not three flavours of the same thing. They do genuinely different jobs, and picking the wrong one costs time, money, and occasionally the commercial relationship you were trying to protect.
Start with the question nobody asks
Before choosing a route, work out what you actually want. Not what you are entitled to, what you want. In practice the answer is usually one of three things:
- Cash, now. You are out of pocket and the project is bleeding.
- A final answer. You need the issue determined properly so everyone can move on.
- To keep working together. The dispute matters, but the relationship matters more.
Those three wants point at three different routes. Choose the route first and you will often find you have chosen the wrong outcome.
Adjudication: fast money, rough justice
Adjudication exists because construction has a cash flow problem. Parties to a construction contract have a statutory right to refer a dispute to adjudication at any time under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act, and the timetable is brutal by design. The adjudicator generally has 28 days from referral to reach a decision, extendable by a further 14 days with the referring party's consent. A longer period is possible, but only if the parties agree it after the dispute has been referred, which is not much help when you are already in the process.
That speed is the point, and it is also the trade-off. Complex, document heavy disputes get compressed into a few weeks and the adjudicator does the best job the timetable allows. What you get is a decision binding on a temporary basis: the parties must comply, and the courts will generally enforce it, but it can later be reopened and finally determined by arbitration, litigation or agreement.
That is the deal. Pay now, argue later. For a payment dispute, a valuation, or a discrete question of entitlement, it is often exactly the right tool. For a sprawling final account with thousands of documents and a dozen intertwined issues, it can be a very expensive way to get a rough answer that nobody accepts as final.
Adjudication answers the question "who holds the money tonight". It does not always answer the question "who was right".
Mediation: the one that keeps the relationship
Mediation is different in kind. The mediator does not decide anything. They are there to help the parties reach their own settlement, usually in a day, confidentially and without prejudice. If it does not settle, nothing said in the room can be used later.
Because nobody is imposing an outcome, mediation can do something the other routes cannot. It can settle the whole commercial position rather than the narrow legal issue. A dispute about one variation can become a conversation about the final account, the retention, the next project and the working relationship. Adjudicators and arbitrators can only decide what is put in front of them. A mediator can help the parties trade across the whole board.
The two mistakes I see most often are dismissing mediation as soft, and leaving it too late. By the time both sides have spent heavily and dug into their positions, settlement is harder, not easier. Mediation works best before the costs become part of the argument.
Arbitration: private, final, and not necessarily cheap
Arbitration is a proper determination. The parties appoint a tribunal, often chosen for genuine construction expertise, the process is private, and the award is final and binding with only limited routes of challenge. Awards are also readily enforceable across borders, which matters when one party sits outside the UK.
The catch is that arbitration is not automatically quicker or cheaper than court. It can be as long and as expensive as litigation, and sometimes more so. What it buys you is privacy, a decision maker who understands construction, procedural flexibility and international enforceability. If you do not need those things, the Technology and Construction Court is a very capable forum and may be the better option.
Arbitration has also been modernised. Reforms in force since August 2025 gave tribunals an express power to make an award on a summary basis where a claim or defence has no real prospect of success, which goes some way to answering the old complaint that hopeless points still had to be run all the way to a hearing.
One practical point that is often missed: you only arbitrate if the contract says so. Check the dispute resolution clause before you decide anything, because it may have made the decision for you, and some contracts require escalation steps to be taken in order.
How to actually choose
A short set of questions gets most people to the right answer:
- What outcome do you want: cash, finality, or the relationship?
- What does the contract require? Is there an arbitration clause or a tiered escalation clause?
- Is the issue discrete, or is it the whole account?
- What is genuinely at stake, against the cost and management time of each route?
- Do you have to keep working with these people next month?
And a point that gets forgotten: these routes are not mutually exclusive. Adjudicate to fix the cash flow, then mediate to settle everything else. Adjudicate to get a decision that reframes the negotiation, then use it as the platform for a commercial deal. The routes can be sequenced deliberately rather than treated as one irreversible choice.
Adjudicate for cash. Arbitrate for finality. Mediate when what you actually need is a deal both sides can live with.
Whatever route you take, the file decides it
There is one thing common to all three. Whoever presents the better contemporaneous record tends to do better. Adjudicators work at speed and rely heavily on the documents. Arbitrators test the evidence. Mediators use the strength of each side's position to move them. In every case, the party with the notices served, the records kept and the correspondence in order is negotiating from higher ground.
That is the unglamorous truth. The dispute is often won or lost long before anyone picks a route, in the quality of the contract administration that came before it.
The other half of this is the record. Defender Platform tracks your notices, deadlines and commercial position as the job runs, so that if a dispute does arrive you are arguing from a complete file rather than a reconstructed one.