The Tiger by William Blake:

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night”

May’s news was dominated by the election, the first full coalition government since the end of the Second World War and the first power-sharing deal between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. We reported on the construction industry’s reaction, the government’s coalition programme, the emergency budget and the new construction minister. Continue reading →

Since the initial coalition agreement was published, three key political developments have taken place. None of these developments have fundamentally altered the position for construction companies and construction lawyers, and all mean that some residual political and practical uncertainty remains. Continue reading →

If the parties to a building contract get to the point where one (or even both) of them wants to terminate the contract then, usually, something has gone very wrong.

Each individual construction or engineering contract has its own requirements for termination, so this Ask the team assumes that:

• The parties have agreed and signed a JCT Standard Building Contract, 2005 edition, Revision 2 2009 (SBC05).
• The employer wishes to terminate the contractor’s employment under the building contract because the contractor has all but left the site, without good reason, and the works have nearly ground to a halt.
• The employer has decided to use the contractual right to terminate in the SBC05, rather than any common law right it may have to treat the contract as repudiated.

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The construction industry has been hit hard by the current recession. Beyond headlines like “Heathrow third runway scrapped”, the construction industry faces further uncertainty as it waits to see what the new coalition government’s public sector spending cuts really mean for key areas, such as housebuilding, and for major projects, such as Crossrail. Continue reading →

Yesterday evening the Society of Construction Law (SCL) hosted Coulson J’s talk, “The perfect adjudicator’s decision”, which was chaired by Paul Darling QC.

Coulson J suggested that he had never seen a perfect decision and, unless Kate Winslet was sitting as an adjudicator, the perfect adjudicator does not exist. Therefore, although entitled, “The perfect adjudicator’s decision”, this talk could just as easily have been called “What does it take to be a ‘perfect’ adjudicator?” or, perhaps, more to the point, “What should the decision include and what shouldn’t be in there?”. Instead, Coulson J opted for his “seven golden rules of adjudication”.

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