Monthly Archives: April 2015

REUTERS | Toby Melville
April 29, 2015

April 2015 digest: CDM 2015 (again), PD 51J and PAPs

Elizabeth Bentley, Ode to Spring:

“Welcome, sweet season of delight,
What beauties charm the wond’ring sight.”

April has been a quiet month in terms of construction current awareness. In part, this may have been because the pre-election purdah period started on 30 March and the TCC’s Easter term only began on 14 April. One wonders if this is the calm before the storm that will inevitably follow next month’s general election.

Although it may have been a quiet month, it hasn’t been short on acronyms: Continue reading →

REUTERS | Navesh Chitrakar
April 28, 2015

Arbitration, adjudication and insolvency

By all accounts arbitration is enjoying a bit of a resurgence. Rising court fees and increasing costs management in the TCC, as well as an increasing number of international contractors working in the UK, appears to be leading to more and more parties choosing arbitration, rather than litigation, in their contracts.

However, even though parties enter into arbitration agreements, on occasion they try to avoid them, and that’s what happened in the case I want to talk about this week: Philpott and another v Lycee Francais Charles De Gaulle School. It’s actually a Chancery case heard in Birmingham by HHJ Purle QC, and concerned a claim by a contractor in a creditors voluntary arrangement (CVA). Continue reading →

REUTERS | Dinuka Liyanawatte
April 27, 2015

Getting paid: remedies for non-payment in the UAE construction industry

Practical measures for recovering payment unique to the local environment.

One of the biggest risks that a contractor faces on any construction project is non-payment. Default on payment is as much a fact of business life in the UAE construction industry as in the UK and any other part of the world. While many of the remedies available in the UK also apply in the UAE, others are unique to the region and may not be known to those unfamiliar with contracting here. Continue reading →

REUTERS | Corbis
April 22, 2015

TeCSA and the TCC: 25 years of collaboration

As Lord Dyson, MR reminded us in last month’s excellent Keating lecture, construction law and the TCC used to be perceived as:

“a rather dull specialist subject… all about boring Scott Schedules… and delay claims… known in the trade as ‘buggeration claims’.”

But to those of us who know and love this specialist area, we know it is so much more than just “boring Scott Schedules“. Continue reading →

REUTERS | David W Cerny
April 21, 2015

No second bite of cherry as adjudicator’s decision final and binding

I have looked at the binding nature of adjudicators’ decisions previously. For example, I have considered how one adjudicator is bound by another adjudicator’s earlier decision and also looked at the concept of temporary finality. On both occasions, the focus was on section 108(3) of the Construction Act 1996 and paragraph 23(2) of the Scheme for Construction Contracts 1998.

Therefore it was interesting to read HHJ Stephen Davies QC’s judgment in Khurana and Khurana v Weber Construction Ltd, where the focus had shifted away from the statutory nature of adjudication and was firmly on contractual issues. Continue reading →

REUTERS | iStockphoto
April 7, 2015

Hedging your bets in adjudicator nomination doesn’t pay

Life as an adjudicator can be hard sometimes, what with all the jurisdictional challenges flying around. Questions about who we know, who we don’t know, who we’ve spoken to (or not) and who’ve we’ve done business with over the last few years. However, one thing you might think was a sure-fired bet was your appointment and the rules governing that appointment. However, as HHJ Havelock-Allan QC’s judgment in Ecovision Systems Ltd v Vinci Construction UK Ltd demonstrates, not even that is guaranteed. Continue reading →

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