A couple of weeks ago I attended the Adjudication Society’s regional conference in Dublin. The conference’s focus was on the Construction Contracts Act 2013 which, among other things, introduces statutory adjudication to Ireland. As some of you may recall, Jonathan went to a similar conference last year and wrote about some of the issues that came out of that conference. Now it’s my turn! Continue reading


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

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

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

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

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

Let’s be honest about it, Matt and I have been slightly spoilt over the past few months when it comes to adjudication enforcement cases to blog about. There has been a plethora of interesting cases streaming out of the TCC, and the latest instalment from Coulson J is CSK Electrical v Kingswood Electrical. Continue reading

Emerging principals? Implementing CDM 2015
CDM 2015 finally went live on Monday. It’s early days, but are there any patterns emerging as to how the new Regulations will be implemented? I think there may be, given what we are seeing and discussions I’ve had with developers, consultants and others. Continue reading

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

March 2015 digest: adjudication, CDM 2015 and an election
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace:
“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
It is less than six weeks to the general election. While the media’s current focus is on the live TV debates and who will take part and when, quietly in the background the government has been getting its house in order. This has resulted in a plethora of legislation making it on to the statute books ready for purdah. There was also the budget this month, although not many new announcements were included for the construction industry. Continue reading