Press Articles

Anybody reading this article who has been involved in a construction dispute will know that it can be an expensive business. Lawyers do not wear nice suits because they are cheap to hire!

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I attend a lot of settlement meetings with clients. These are invariably conducted on a “without prejudice” basis and the purpose of such a meeting is both simple and given away by its title.

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Let’s face facts. Things are getting pretty tough out there and being a director of any company operating in the construction sector at present is not for the faint hearted. Rising costs and too many companies chasing too few orders leads to one thing only – reduced margins and losses!

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Cowgill Holloway’s corporate finance department has advised on the merger of The Vinden Partnership Ltd and Watson Laurie Group, a group of companies controlled by Andrew Crompton.

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My last article dealt with the subject of an Adjudicator’s power to award interest under the Scheme for Construction Contracts (England and Wales) Regulations 1998 (“the Scheme”). The article concluded by saying that where a contract has no provisions relating to the payment of interest, an Adjudicator has no “freestanding power” to award interest.

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If you have ever found yourself in an adjudication the chances are that either you or your opposing party will have asked the Adjudicator to decide that interest is paid on overdue payments.

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As I write this month’s article I am feeling pretty annoyed by one of our clients. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say that we have conducted several adjudications for this particular client over the last year with considerable success.

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This article is normally devoted to matters of a legal nature but this month I feel compelled to depart from the norm in the hope that somebody from our current government may stumble across it and have a word in the ear of our Darling Chancellor.

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1 May 2008 was the 10 year or tin, if you prefer, anniversary for the starting date for the Housing Grants Construction and Regeneration Act 1996. What a mouthful. I still can’t get my head around the title and prefer to call it the Construction Act along with the thousands of us who work in this wonderful industry.

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As the subprime crisis in America sweeps across the Atlantic causing a significant credit squeeze in the UK, one of the first sectors in the firing line is construction.
Construction across the UK appears to have fallen victim to the economic uncertainty that exists and latest figures show the sector shrinking for the first time in more than six years.

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I am pretty sure that all the readers of this publication will know something about withholding notices. The requirement for a paying party to issue a written withholding notice where part or all of a payment is to be held back from a Contractor or Sub-Contractor is set down in Section 111 of The Housing Grants Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 (“The Act”).

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When delay occurs on a construction project the cause of delay is either an event for which the Contractor is responsible, one for which the Employer is responsible, or due to factors which are beyond either party’s control. This third class of causation of delay is said to be neutral in terms of causation simply because it is a delay that neither the Employer nor the Contractor is responsible for having caused.

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Regular readers of this column will know that I have something of a passion for mediation. If I ruled the world every day would be Christmas (only joking – you should see Mr Vinden’s credit card bills this year) and I would compel every party to every civil dispute to try mediation as a pre-cursor to litigation in the Courts. Why? -because I am convinced that mediation serves the parties better than the obscenely expensive alternatives.

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Unless you have just spent the best part of 10 years living in outer Mongolia you will be aware that The Housing Grants Construction and Regeneration Act (1996) (“The Act”) changed the commercial life of Contractors and Sub-Contractors working in the UK forever when it was introduced here on 1 May 1998.

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Sometimes it seems that Clients want it all. The cheapest price, the shortest programme, the Contractor assuming as much risk as possible……sound familiar? And then to top it all, the subject of parent company guarantees or other third party guarantees is raised.

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It never ceases to amaze me how small our world is becoming. Who would have thought events in the American sub-prime mortgage market would have such an effect on our UK banking sector? When was the last time you heard of a run on a UK bank? Am I dreaming? And, what does this actually mean for the UK construction sector?

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The Party Wall etc Act 1996, which was introduced throughout England and Wales in July 1997, has recently turned 10 years old. Yet, there are many, including professional property developers, that know very little about the Act.

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If you have been involved in a dispute in the last few years that has ended up in the Courts, the chances are that you will have heard all about mediation. Last month’s article “Stop Gambling and Try Mediation” was written to make readers aware of the Court’s increasing interest in requiring parties to try mediation as an alternative to other more expensive methods of dispute resolution.

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Have you ever received a document marked “Privileged”, “Without Prejudice” or even “Without Prejudice Save as to Costs”? I bet you have, but do you know what these words actually mean? Let me try and explain.

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It never cease to amaze me how people underestimate the complexity of construction projects. With so many parties involved mostly motivated by money, conflicting egos, unrealistic programmes, variations, weather, is it really any wonder that so many construction projects have an inbuilt capacity to go very wrong?

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