Snagging is not the schedule of defects

Snagging happens before practical completion. It is the process of walking the building, listing everything that is not right, and getting it fixed so that the works can be certified.

The schedule of defects is issued at the end of the rectification period, typically a year later, and lists the defects that have appeared since handover.

The consequences are different

Snagging has none in itself. It is project management: a list of things to finish. Its only contractual relevance is that if the items are substantial enough, practical completion cannot be certified.

The schedule of defects is a contractual document. The contractor is obliged to make good what is on it, and the certificate of making good, which releases the balance of the retention, depends on it being cleared.

The confusion that costs money

It arises when snags are carried forward into the rectification period as though they were defects. They are not. A snag is incomplete work; a defect is completed work that has failed.

Practical completion should not be certified with substantial incomplete work outstanding. Where it is certified anyway, for commercial reasons that are usually good ones, the outstanding items should be recorded as a schedule of outstanding work with a date for completion, not folded into the defects process where they will still be argued about eleven months later.

Certifying with items outstanding

A certificate of practical completion cannot be conditional, because the consequences it triggers cannot be conditional. Either the works have reached the standard or they have not.

What can sit alongside a valid certificate is a separate schedule of outstanding items with agreed dates. That preserves the certificate and preserves the record of what is owed.

Timing the defects schedule

The contract usually requires it within a set period after the rectification period ends. Issuing it late weakens the position, delays the certificate of making good, and holds up the final certificate and the retention behind it.

What to record on each item

For snags: what, where, who. For defects: what, where, who, when notified, when made good.

Those two extra dates are the whole difference. They are what shows the rectification period was operated properly if anybody examines it, and they are the first thing missing from a defects list kept as a snagging list.