Southwick housing defects expose contractor collapse risk

Adur District Council says extensive work is needed before residents can move into 49 new council homes in Southwick, West Sussex, after investigations identified problems linked to the collapse of the original contractor.

The development at Albion Street has faced significant delays since Westridge Construction entered administration in September 2023 while works were still under way. Sussex-based Cheesmur Building Contractors was appointed to take over the site and complete the homes.

Further work is now required before the homes can be occupied. The council has pointed to poor construction work inherited from the original contractor, with rectification activity adding cost, delay, and complexity to a scheme that had already been disrupted by contractor failure.

Contractor insolvency rarely ends with a replacement appointment. When a business fails mid-project, the client inherits the physical works, incomplete information, disrupted warranties, uncertain subcontractor records, and the task of establishing exactly what has been built, inspected, changed, or omitted.

The incoming contractor must then work through both the site and the paperwork before the programme can be recovered. Defects may not be fully visible at the point of appointment, drawings may not match site conditions, supplier warranties may be unclear, and remediation can expose further problems once areas are opened up.

Those risks have become sharper under the current building safety regime. Projects involving taller or more complex buildings require robust records showing design intent, construction detail, product information, inspection evidence, maintenance requirements, and safety features. Where the original contractor is no longer available, assembling that record can become a substantial task in its own right.

Adur has previously noted that the Albion Street homes have had to be brought through additional building safety requirements without the support of the original contractor. Even where physical adaptations are limited, clients still need sufficient information to demonstrate how the building has been designed, constructed, and maintained. Gaps in evidence can delay approvals, occupation, and handover just as effectively as visible defects.

The issue also sits within a broader housing delivery problem. Councils are under pressure to provide affordable and social housing, but many local authority schemes are being delivered in a market where construction costs, contractor resilience, compliance obligations, and procurement risk have become more difficult to manage.

A development intended to supply much-needed homes can quickly become a financial and operational burden when quality control fails. The cost is carried through delayed occupation, additional supervision, remedial packages, legal complexity, and reduced confidence in future delivery.

For replacement contractors, taking over a failed project can be commercially difficult because risk is difficult to price cleanly. Survey work, intrusive inspections, revised sequencing, new subcontractor interfaces, and additional approvals can all extend the programme. The contractor also has to protect itself from inheriting responsibility for defects it did not create while still moving the project to completion.

Clients cannot remove insolvency risk entirely, but stronger due diligence, clearer quality gateways, better records, payment discipline, active monitoring, and contingency planning can reduce the damage when a contractor fails. The tighter the project controls before a collapse, the easier it is to recover afterwards.

The Southwick scheme also underlines why quality assurance cannot be treated as a closing-stage exercise. Once a project has moved through several phases, defects can be embedded behind finishes, services, waterproofing, cladding, or external works. Rectification then becomes slower, more expensive, and more disruptive than addressing the issue at the point of installation.

The council’s immediate priority is to complete the necessary works and bring the homes into use. The case leaves a wider warning for public-sector housing delivery: contractor fragility, technical compliance, and record keeping now sit together, and weakness in any one of them can turn a straightforward housing scheme into a prolonged recovery exercise.