Decision Not Violation of Natural Justice

When an adjudicator in a construction dispute gives a ruling, the decision can only be appealed on a limited number of grounds. One of these is ‘breach of natural justice’, which means that the adjudicator’s decision is so obviously flawed that natural justice would be offended if it were allowed to stand.

 It is, unsurprisingly, difficult to win an appeal on these grounds and a recent case saw the court reject one such appeal. One of the interesting aspects of the ruling was that the court was careful to point out that the failure by the adjudicator to consider and address a substantive defence would be a breach of natural justice, whereas failure to consider and address an aspect of the defence would not.