What is snagging, and whose job is it to track it to closure?

Snagging is the process of finding, listing and putting right the defects and incomplete items that remain when the works are substantially done: the marked paintwork, the door that binds, the missing ironmongery, the commissioning that never quite finished. It runs from the pre-completion inspections through practical completion and on through the rectification period, when defects that appear in use are notified and made good. Fixing snags belongs to the trades that caused them; the tracking, easily underestimated, is a job in its own right and decides whether closeout finishes. A snag list is only useful if it is consolidated into one register rather than scattered across a dozen inspection sheets, if each item names who owns it and what evidence closes it, and if somebody chases each to a documented completion rather than assuming silence means done. That ownership matters because making-good certificates, and the retention behind them, do not issue until the defects are demonstrably closed, so an untracked snag list quietly holds the last of the money hostage as well as the employer's satisfaction. On a well-run job the tracking sits with one person who keeps the register, chases the trades, records the making good with photographs and sign-offs, and pushes for the certificate the day the work supports it. On a badly-run one it sits with nobody, and the snags, the certificate and the money drift together.

Take a roofing subcontractor near the end of a JCT job whose completion snags were noted on three different inspectors' sheets and never gathered up. Nobody owned the list, so the trades fixed what they happened to see, ignored the rest, and the record of what had been made good was a few unlabelled photos on a phone. When they applied for their first retention release, the contractor pointed at open snags with no evidence of completion and declined, and the argument dragged for months over items that had mostly been done. On their next job they kept one register: every snag consolidated, each with an owner and a photograph of the making good filed against it, chased weekly until signed off. When making good was complete they presented the register, the certifier had nothing to dispute, the certificate issued, and the retention followed.