What can you hold an agency to when results do not come?

Search for what can be done about an agency that is not delivering, and the Consumer Rights Act 2015 comes up quickly. It is the wrong Act. The 2015 Act covers contracts between a trader and a consumer, and a UK professional services firm buying marketing is a business buyer. The statute that governs the contract is older and shorter than the one most pages name: the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982.

The distinction is worth ten minutes, because the 1982 Act does something a firm assumes its own paperwork had to do. It puts a quality standard into the agreement whether or not anybody typed one. Read section 13 against two neighbouring sections and the 1977 Act it defers to, and a managing partner can work out which complaints on their list are a breach and which are a disappointment.

The Act that covers your contract is not the one you will find first

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 applies where a trader supplies a consumer, and the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 governs a business to business supply of services. The 2015 Act pulled consumer contracts out of the older statute and restated the duty for consumers in its own section 49. The 1982 Act was left in place for everybody else, which means every practice or recruitment agency in the UK buying a service from another business.

What reasonable care and skill promises, and what it does not

Section 13 implies a standard of competence, and competence is about the way work was carried out rather than the result it produced. A campaign can be competently planned and delivered on time and still return nothing a partner would call a result. On the implied term alone, that is not a breach.

This is where the frustration at month four usually sits. The complaint is about outcome, and outcome is the one thing the implied term does not reach. The complaints that do land are quieter: work not done at all, or work done below the standard a competent supplier in that field would accept. Delay belongs with them and has its own provision, because section 14 implies that where the contract fixes no date the service will be carried out within a reasonable time.

A statement of work does not remove the standard

Section 16(2) provides that an express term does not negative a term implied by the Act unless it is inconsistent with that term.

It does not work that way. Describing the work is not inconsistent with doing it competently, so the implied standard survives alongside the scope. Section 16(1) does allow an implied duty to be varied by express agreement, or by a course of dealing binding both parties, and it says so subject to the 1977 Act. So the clause worth finding is not in the scope at all. It is in the limitation of liability, usually the shortest paragraph in the pack.

A retainer schedule is weaker than it looks for the same reason: what a retainer actually covers sets out what is included, never to what standard.

A liability cap in standard terms still has to be reasonable

Section 3 of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 applies where a firm contracted on the supplier's written standard terms of business. Where it applies, the supplier cannot by reference to a contract term restrict its liability for its own breach, or claim to be entitled to render a performance substantially different from what was reasonably expected, except so far as the term satisfies the requirement of reasonableness. Section 11 sets that test by what was fair and reasonable to include, given the circumstances in the contemplation of the parties at the time.

Now the part that runs against instinct. Section 3 turns on the contract having been made on written standard terms of business, so where terms were genuinely negotiated rather than presented as a pack it does not apply to them. A UK firm that signed the agency's standard document unamended can therefore stand in a stronger position on a liability cap than one that negotiated the same cap line by line.

Whether amended terms still count as standard terms is a question of fact for a solicitor, not an argument for signing anything unread. The useful part is knowing the question exists before the review meeting.

Four steps before you talk about leaving

Most of what a firm wants to enforce was never written down, so the first move is to write it down now rather than to reach for the contract. None of it needs a solicitor.

When you should not appoint anybody else yet

If the brief never said what the work was meant to change, replacing the supplier changes the invoice and nothing else. Two situations are worth ruling out first. One is where nobody at the firm owns the relationship. An agency with no counterpart sets its own priorities, and a new agency will do the same on a new rate. The other is where the firm cannot state the baseline. Without a number from before the work started, no supplier can be held to an improvement, and the next engagement ends the same way.

It is worth being honest about how this agency was chosen. A shortlist built from directory profiles was probably filtered on solvency rather than delivery, and what those badges actually verify explains why a verified supplier can still be the wrong one. Before moving, establish what the firm already owns, because that changes what a replacement is asked to build.

Where the contract is silent, the 1982 Act supplies the standard, the timing and the charge. It supplies no results, and that gap is closed at the start rather than at the review. Partners who would rather test the brief before changing supplier can see what we assess before recommending anyone.