The High Court has ordered Tenderbids Ltd, trading as Bastion, to pay most of Electrical Waste Management Ltd’s legal costs after Bastion failed in an attempt to enforce a construction adjudicator’s award.
Mr Justice Garrett Simons had already ruled in March 2025 that the adjudication process was a nullity because statutory requirements governing service of the notice of intention to refer had not been followed. His June 18 supplemental judgment dealt with who should bear the resulting legal costs.
The starting point was that Electrical Waste Management had been entirely successful and was therefore normally entitled to its costs.
Bastion argued for a different order. It said the respondent had not engaged initially and only disclosed its jurisdictional objection on December 19, 2024, the date originally fixed for the enforcement hearing. Bastion sought its own costs up to that point.
The court accepted that it would have been preferable for Electrical Waste Management to flag the service objection earlier. It also found that, had Bastion withdrawn once the objection was disclosed, there would have been good grounds for making no costs order against it.
That did not happen. The respondent offered on December 19 to settle with each side bearing its own costs. Bastion did not accept. It instead contested the service point, received time to file written submissions and proceeded to a resumed hearing in February 2025. The issue was ultimately decided against it.
Mr Justice Simons rejected the argument that Electrical Waste Management should have raised the point through a separate preliminary application. Construction adjudication enforcement is designed to be dealt with quickly, usually in a single short hearing, and the service issue was the respondent’s only substantive defence.
Electrical Waste Management was therefore awarded its costs, including the February written submissions. However, it cannot recover costs for the court listings on December 19 or 20, 2024. The court also provisionally held that it should receive the additional costs of the later costs dispute itself.