Routine Correspondence in Housing Disrepair Costs: When Is an Email More Than a Six-Minute Item?

The Point of Dispute reads: “the receiving party has claimed excessive time for correspondence. Letters and emails are routine communications and should be limited to six-minute units.”

Sometimes that is right. As a general proposition it is wrong, and PD 47 says so.

The rule recognises three categories, not one: routine letters and emails; letters and emails of substance; and electronic communications which properly amount to attendances. For that third category, paragraph 5.22(2) provides that the court may, in its discretion, allow an actual time charge for preparation, provided the time taken has been recorded.

Compare:

“Please confirm whether the contractor attended today.”

“We have reviewed your revised scope of works against the expert report. The proposed works do not address the external water penetration identified at paragraph 18, nor the damaged bedroom plaster. Please confirm whether those items are now admitted and provide revised commencement and completion dates.”

Both are emails. They are not the same legal work. The question is never was this an email? — it is what did preparing this communication actually require?

What PD 47 provides

The simplicity test at 5.14 governs telephone calls as well, and the classification of client calls is dealt with separately in our guide to routine calls and recoverable telephone attendances. This article is about the written half, and about the provision that has no telephone equivalent: actual time under 5.22(2).

The incoming correspondence point most bills get wrong

The second sentence of 5.22(1) is easy to miss and worth reading closely:

“The unit charge for letters out and e-mails out will include perusing and considering the routine letters in or e-mails in.”

So where the landlord emails “inspection confirmed for Tuesday at 10am” and the solicitor reads it and replies “confirmed, thank you”, that is what the unit structure is built for. Claiming a perusal of the routine email in and a routine email out, as though they were two separate items of work, over-claims against the rule.

The qualifier is routine, and it is doing real work. A six-page response dealing with liability, notice, expert evidence, repairs, access, damages and costs is not a routine incoming email, and considering it properly is not covered by somebody else’s unit charge.

What makes a letter or email one of substance?

There is no word count. A four-line email can carry substantive advice; a two-page letter can be largely repetition.

The useful question is whether preparing it required meaningful legal work — analysis, advice, detailed instructions, negotiation, application of evidence, formulating an argument, weighing risk, or a strategic decision.

Compare:

“Please provide the repair records requested in our Letter of Claim.”

“The disclosure provided does not include the repair logs for the period in which notice is disputed. Your client relies on lack of notice in its response. Please provide the inspection records, contractor orders and repair-history entries requested at paragraph 12 of the Letter of Claim, failing which the claimant will proceed on the present evidence.”

One is a request. The other applies the evidence to a pleaded issue and sets a consequence.

Length cuts both ways

A long email may suggest substance without proving it. A short one may follow twenty-four minutes spent considering an expert report, a repair proposal, the settlement position and Part 36 risk before six lines of recommendation.

The costs analysis is not six lines equals six minutes. But nor is the recorded figure self-proving — it has to be supportable by the work behind it.

Actual time is a discretion, not an entitlement

This is the qualification that has to travel with the argument.

Paragraph 5.22(2) says the court may, in its discretion, allow actual time. It does not say recorded time must be paid. A substantive email can still be overworked, repetitive, poorly delegated, duplicative of earlier advice, or charged at the wrong rate.

Three outcomes, not two — which is why an all-or-nothing position from either side tends to lose ground it did not need to lose.

The time must actually have been recorded

The condition in 5.22(2) is express. That creates a real problem for reconstruction. If the file says “Email to Defendant — 0.1”, it is difficult at costs stage to say it probably took 0.6. If it says “Review expert report and Defendant works proposal; prepare substantive response identifying outstanding defects — 0.4”, the claim has an evidential base.

A costs draftsman should not invent time after the event, and a bill that does invites a challenge to everything around it.

The entry and the email should agree

If the record says “detailed liability response — 0.5” and the email says “please see attached”, there is a problem. If substantial work went into a written response but the bill says only “Email Defendant — 0.5”, the work may be legitimate and the presentation is still poor.

Drafting is not sending

A paying party will say “it was one email”. But preparing it may have required reviewing documents, considering expert evidence, taking instructions, checking the chronology, analysing an offer or formulating a substantive position.

The legal work is the preparation, not pressing send. Equally, those preparatory tasks should not then appear again elsewhere in the bill unless they were genuinely separate items.

Block billing makes correspondence hard to assess

Consider:

“Review correspondence, draft emails, telephone client and update file — 1.2.”

Which part was reviewing, which substantive drafting, which routine communication, which a telephone attendance, which administration? The entry cannot be assessed, and the paying party will say so.

Better:

“Review Defendant’s substantive repair proposal and compare with expert schedule — 0.3.”

“Prepare response identifying outstanding works and requesting revised timetable — 0.3.”

But block billing is not automatically fatal

A single attendance may naturally involve connected steps. “Review Defendant offer and prepare substantive advice email to client — 0.4” is one coherent piece of work.

The problem is not grouping as such. It is grouping materially different tasks so that nobody can tell what was done, how long each took or whether each was reasonable. The test is assessability.

Where the substantive written work comes from

Correspondence with the paying party

Responding to disputed liability, allegations of no notice, incomplete disclosure, access allegations, expert evidence, the scope of remedial works, missed works, settlement and Part 36 — this is where the heaviest written work usually sits.

But ask whether each communication advanced the case. A lengthy letter every time a landlord misses a minor deadline is as vulnerable as too many routine emails.

Correspondence the landlord caused

No Protocol response, incomplete disclosure, changing repair proposals, missed appointments, works left undone, a shifting liability position — each may reasonably generate further correspondence, and CPR 44.3(5)(d) brings additional work generated by the paying party into the proportionality assessment.

The same safeguard applies as everywhere else: conduct explains why the work arose, and does not make the response automatically reasonable in amount. One necessary chaser is not five, and a Monday-Wednesday-Friday sequence with no development between them will not pass in full.

Correspondence with experts

“Please confirm inspection availability” is routine. “Please review the Defendant’s revised schedule and confirm whether the proposed internal mould wash and ventilation works address the penetrating damp identified at paragraphs 14 to 18” engages with technical evidence.

Do not double count reviewing the report, drafting the questions and reviewing the answers as separate entries where they were one task — and the recoverability of the expert’s own fee is a different question, dealt with in our guide to when a surveyor fee is recoverable.

Settlement and Part 36

A concise written response can reflect real analysis — damages, repair terms, timing of works, costs wording, Part 36 consequences, earlier offers, litigation risk, instructions.

Substantive still does not mean immune. A Grade A partner spending an hour and a half on a straightforward acceptance email faces time, grade and delegation challenges even though the communication was not routine — see defending senior fee earner rates.

Written advice to the client

The same simplicity test applies. “Your inspection is booked for Thursday” is routine; substantive written advice on the expert report, the repair proposal and the settlement position is not. Where the work properly amounts to an attendance and the time was recorded, 5.22(2) is available.

Vulnerability can affect written work as well as calls — advice in simpler language, staged information, translation, repeated explanation, alternative formats. Where that genuinely creates additional work, CPR 44.3(5)(f) may be engaged. The point here is narrower: if the written work took longer because a reasonable adjustment was required, the file should show why.

Two things that do not increase the cost

Recipients. One email to the landlord, the Defendant solicitor, the surveyor and the client is one piece of drafted correspondence. Forwarding the same substantive email separately does not justify repeated full drafting charges.

The tool used. Precedent, dictation, document automation or AI assistance — the test is unchanged: what reasonable legal work was required, what was actually done, how long it reasonably took, and whether the sum is reasonable. Firms should not bill time that was not spent; paying parties should not assume analysis became routine because technology helped produce the wording.

Templates sit in the same place. A Letter of Claim precedent still requires the tenancy reviewed, the defects identified, notice set out, expert evidence incorporated, disclosure specified and relief formulated. The existence of a precedent does not make that six minutes — and a template sent with almost no adaptation should not be presented as drafted from scratch.

Presentation: what PD 47 expects of the bill

Paragraph 5.13 expects the bill itself to separate routine from non-routine work. A bill should not inflate routine units into attendances, bury substantive written work inside a routine total, or describe every communication identically.

Where there are twenty or more non-routine attendances and communications under a head, paragraph 5.18 requires the claim to be made as a total with the full dates and details in a schedule, chronologically. A heavy correspondence file should not become an unreadable wall of entries — the schedule exists so the work can still be assessed.

Answering the Point

A weak Reply says the correspondence was reasonably and proportionately incurred. That does not engage the classification argument at all. A strong one:

• Concedes the genuinely routine. Do not defend an appointment confirmation as an attendance.
• Identifies the substantive items — advice, instructions, liability, expert evidence, repairs, settlement, disclosure.
• Cites the right distinction — 5.14 separates routine from letters and e-mails of substance; 5.22(2) allows actual time for electronic communications amounting to attendances.
• Shows the time was recorded, because 5.22(2) requires it.
• Addresses duration separately — substantive and overworked is a real outcome.
• Establishes the chronology where the paying party’s conduct generated the correspondence.

The proposed blanket reduction of the correspondence to routine six-minute units is not accepted. The receiving party accepts that genuinely routine communications fall within the ordinary unit treatment under PD 47 paragraph 5.22(1).

The items at [identify] were not simple routine communications. They included substantive correspondence addressing the Defendant’s disputed notice position, incomplete repair disclosure and revised scope of remedial works. Paragraph 5.14 expressly distinguishes routine communications from letters and e-mails of substance, and in relation to electronic communications properly amounting to attendances paragraph 5.22(2) gives the court a discretion to allow actual time where the time taken has been recorded. That time was contemporaneously recorded.

Then deal with the specific duration and rate challenge, which is a different argument.

Wrong on classification, right on time

Take a substantive response claimed at 0.8. The court may well find it was not routine and that forty-eight minutes was excessive. Defeating the six-minute argument is not winning the item. Classification and quantum are separate, and treating them as one is how a good point gets over-argued.

When to concede

Some of this should go, and conceding it protects the rest:

• simple updates claimed by actual time;
• routine appointment emails;
• repetitive chasers with no development between them;
• written advice duplicating advice already given;
• boilerplate barely adapted to the file;
• correspondence caused by the firm’s own administrative failure;
• actual-time claims unsupported by contemporaneous recording;
• several fee earners drafting or reviewing the same straightforward communication;
• substantive classification claimed only because the email was long.

An audit before the bill goes out

• Which communications are genuinely routine, and have they been treated consistently?
• Are routine incoming emails being claimed separately, contrary to 5.22(1)?
• Which are substantive, and what made each one different?
• Did it involve analysis, instructions, expert evidence, settlement, liability or notice?
• Where actual time is claimed, was it contemporaneously recorded?
• Would the underlying email support the description in the bill?
• Is the duration reasonable, and was the right fee earner used?
• Is the time duplicated elsewhere, and does any entry mix unrelated tasks?
• Does the bill distinguish routine from non-routine, and is a 5.18 schedule needed?

The question that decides most of it: what makes this communication more than routine? If the answer is “it was an email that took a while”, the argument is not there.

Key takeaway

Three stages, argued separately:

• Classification — routine, or a letter or e-mail of substance?
• Evidence — if actual time is claimed under 5.22(2), was it recorded, and does the file support the work?
• Quantum — were the time, the rate and the fee earner reasonable?

That prevents both standard errors:

Paying party: every email is 0.1. Receiving party: recorded time is automatically recoverable. Neither follows from PD 47.

An email is only the delivery method. The costs question is whether the work behind it was routine, substantive and reasonably undertaken.

We prepare and negotiate Housing Disrepair costs for claimant solicitor firms, including correspondence challenges. Has the Defendant reduced substantive emails to routine units? Send us the bill, the Points of Dispute and the correspondence and we will separate the routine traffic from the written work that actually required legal analysis, on a fixed fee agreed before instruction.

Sources: Practice Direction 47, in particular paragraph 5.13 on the presentation of routine and non-routine communications, paragraph 5.14 defining routine communications by their simplicity, paragraph 5.18 on schedules where there are twenty or more non-routine attendances and communications, paragraph 5.22(1) on the six-minute unit and its inclusion of perusing and considering routine incoming letters and e-mails, and paragraph 5.22(2) on the court’s discretion to allow an actual time charge for electronic communications properly amounting to attendances where the time taken has been recorded; together with CPR 44.3 and 44.4.