The five per cent rule

How we work

Why we explain it before quoting

The Breyne Act of 9 July 1971 governs contracts where someone undertakes to build a dwelling, or to supply one still to be built, and requires payment from the client before the works are complete. Its protections are substantial and, crucially, mandatory: they apply whether or not the contract mentions them, and a clause purporting to reduce them is ineffective. A written contract with prescribed particulars and the plans annexed. A deposit limited to five per cent. Payments called only in proportion to work actually executed. A compulsory completion guarantee. And acceptance in two stages, at least a year apart.

Each of those exists because of a specific failure. The deposit cap and the progress-linked payments exist because a contractor holding a large sum for unperformed work can disappear with it. The completion guarantee exists because contractors become insolvent mid-build and the client is left with a shell and no money. The two-stage acceptance exists because a house reveals its defects over a year of weather, not on the afternoon somebody walks round with a clipboard.

The protections are widely unknown, which is what makes them easy to erode in practice. Clients are asked for substantial deposits, invoiced ahead of progress, and presented with provisional acceptance as though it closed the matter. None of that becomes lawful because the client agreed to it. So we state at the outset whether a particular engagement falls inside the Act, and where it does, we work within it — and where we are a subcontractor to a developer, we say that too, because the protections then belong to the eventual buyer against that developer rather than to anyone in our chain.