The scaffolding came down on a Thursday, and so did the job. You have six years from that day to do something about it — the Limitation Act 1980 gives a broken simple contract no longer — which sounds generous right up until you are the one out of pocket and waiting.
You’d paid half up front. A deposit against fitted wardrobes, a pallet of stock, a website that was meant to go live in March. Then the work stopped. The messages stopped. And the thing you’re left holding isn’t really a legal problem yet. It’s a blank page.
Here is what nobody mentions at the deposit stage. Before you can take a broken contract to the county court, the court expects you to have written a letter first.
Not a claim form. Not Form N1. A letter — the letter before claim — and it isn’t a courtesy you can skip. The Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols, which governs the ground before litigation, expects the parties to swap enough information to understand each other’s position and to try to settle without a judge. Go straight to court without it and the court will still hear you. It will also weigh, when costs are decided, whether you tried.
So the letter does two jobs at once. It’s the thing that might end this before it starts — a surprising number of disputes settle the week a real letter arrives, precisely because the alternative has suddenly become visible. And it’s the thing that protects you if the other side doesn’t move.
The difficulty is that blank page. A letter before claim has a shape, and the shape is set out in the same Practice Direction. It must give concise details of the claim: the basis on which you say the contract was broken, a summary of the facts, what you want, and — if you’re claiming money — how the figure is worked out. That last part is where people stall. “They owe me for the whole thing” is a grievance. “£4,200, being the deposit paid on 3 March plus the £600 another firm quoted to finish the work” is a claim.
Then there’s the tone, which is where the quiet fury tends to leak in. It shouldn’t. The letter that works is dull. It’s dated. It gives a reasonable time to reply — the Practice Direction talks about 14 days in a straightforward case, longer where things are genuinely complex — and it states, flatly and without threat, what follows if that date passes. Anger isn’t evidence. A timeline is.
And you can write it yourself. That’s worth saying plainly, because the pull to hand the whole thing over is strongest when you’re the wronged party and short of cash. In Barton v Wright Hassall LLP [2018] UKSC 12, the Supreme Court held that a litigant in person is generally expected to get the procedure right, the same as anyone else. That cuts both ways. The rules apply to you — and they also belong to you.
Before any of it, check whether you need the court at all. If the other side belongs to a trade body or an ombudsman scheme, that route costs nothing. Citizens Advice will talk a consumer contract through with you for free. GOV.UK sets out the county court money-claim process for disputes up to £10,000, the ceiling for the small claims track, where most contract arguments of this size are decided. Whichever way you go, the letter before claim is the same hinge the whole thing turns on.
What stops most people isn’t the law. It’s the wording — the fear of sounding too soft to matter, or too aggressive to help. That’s the part Chris was built for. You tell Chris what you agreed, what you paid, and what didn’t happen; Chris asks the questions the Practice Direction would ask — the basis, the facts, the figure, the deadline — and drafts the letter before claim in your name, blanks filled, tone held flat. You read it. You send it. The task that was going to sit on your kitchen table another week is finished.
The contract was broken by someone else. The letter is yours.
Come back when the reply lands — or when it doesn’t — and we’ll take the next step together.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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