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:
- The CDM 2015 came into force on 6 April and with it came JCT amendment sheets, updated schedules of amendments and new HSE guidance (but no new AcOP). Iain Suttie highlighted some of the issues he’s seeing on their implementation.
- The 79th update of the CPR introduced PD 51J (the new TCC electronic filing pilot, which starts next month) and the PDPAC was replaced by the Pre-action PD (although the construction PAP remains unchanged, for now). Caroline Pope also looked at 25 years of collaboration between TeCSA and the TCC.
- Minor changes were made to the CIS gross payment registration scheme.
We may have seen a plethora of adjudication cases over recent months, but not one enforcement or declaratory relief judgment was published during April. That didn’t stop Jonathan Cope writing about jurisdictional challenges (in CSK Electrical v Kingwood) or the impact of a CVA, rule 4.90 of the Insolvency Rules 1986 and the right to adjudicate (in Philpott v Lycee). Similarly, Matt Molloy considered what happened when the parties agreed an adjudicator’s decision was binding (in Khurana v Webster) and highlighted the need for everyone to be clear which adjudication rules applied to an adjudication (in Ecovision v Vinci).
Public procurement case law continues to develop unabated and this month we saw both Northern Ireland Water and Bristol City Council before the courts. The European Commission launched a consultation to evaluate the effectiveness of the Remedies Directive. We also had the chance to read Practical Law Public Sector’s advice on when to use a PQQ, and what John Bennett thinks of the new innovation partnership procurement procedure introduced under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. In case you missed any cases in March, we also published a public procurement case digest.
Other issues in the news included publication of the JCT home owner contracts 2015, the lifting of an injunction restraining the call of a retention bond, a paper on reform of insurance contract law and news of another breakfast roundtable, this time discussing liquidated damages. Finally, Mark Raymont and Charlotte Leggett considered remedies for non-payment in the UAE.
