As anyone who has holidayed in the UK this summer will know, we have not had the barbecue summer that the Met Office promised. July was provisionally the wettest month on record in England and Wales and it feels like August has followed suit. If only a Spanish proverb was true:
“When it rains in August, it rains honey and wine.”
The courts’ summer recess may have started, but someone forgot to tell the Technology and Construction Court (TCC). It was very busy at the start of the month dealing with a number of adjudication enforcement cases looking, in part, at costs.
However, not everyone went on holiday this month. In other news:
- The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) set out its next ten milestones at the Olympic site: The big build: structures.
- The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued enforcement notices against 14 construction companies for blacklisting workers.
- The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) endorsed the NEC3 as “the best practice contract form for construction projects, in the UK and overseas.”
- The Government announced its plans for a Chief Construction Adviser.
Finally, we continued our review of the amendments in the JCT Design and Build Contract 2005 edition (DB05), made by the JCT’s Revision 2 2009. We have finished reviewing the minutiae of the changes to the payment clauses and are left wondering whether the industry wanted or needed this tinkering. On a brighter note, not only did England win the Ashes, but we also managed to publish seven new practice notes.
