Liverpool City Council contract typo decision ruled 'unfair'

VIAM went bust last year leaving five road schemes in the city half finished

Liverpool City Council has won a court battle with a collapsed contractor over a £128,500 payment for fencing after a row over a "typographical error".

The High Court, sitting in Manchester, heard an order for the authority to pay Vital Infrastructure Asset Management (VIAM) was "procedurally unfair".

The judge said the adjudicator had decided the council agreed to an error in the contract without any discussion.

VIAM went bust in 2021, leaving five road schemes in the city half finished.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service said the council had initially refused to make the fence maintenance payment plus interest to VIAM after it went into administration.

Almost £5m of work was not completed on projects across the city when the firm went bust, leaving the authority scrambling to appoint a new contractor.

The authority made an insolvency application seeking permission to bring proceedings against the company over the judgement.

His Honour Judge Stephen Davies found the conduct of an adjudication about the payment to be a "fundamental departure from the obligation to follow a fair procedure" on the grounds that it had been decided the council had agreed the existence of a typographical error in the contract, despite no evidence of the point being argued by either side.

He said the council had "lost the opportunity to have the substantive arguments which it did put forward determined by him and there is no suggestion or obvious basis for my concluding these arguments were incontrovertibly misconceived".

He added it was a "departure from natural justice".

Speaking afterwards, councillor Dan Barrington, the cabinet member for transport and environment, said it "would have been grossly unfair for council tax payers to have had to stump up this money when VIAM had gone into administration, leaving work unfinished across the city".

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