United Kingdom construction claims: Views of professionals

A novel approach has been used to attempt to understand how contractors justify their claims on construction contracts and how contract administrators are likely to assess them. This is done by encapsulating particular claim types into scenarios and interviewing not only contractors and contract administrators, but also claims consultants, to hear their views on how the situations represented by the scenarios should be resolved. In this paper, four areas of general uncertainty surrounding claims in the United Kingdom are described and the results of the survey on these four areas are reported. The concerns addressed are: the treatment of exceptionally adverse weather; dealing with early completion schedules; quantification of the prolongation costs associated with an approved extension of time; and concurrent delays. The results show some good agreement, particularly on the problems of dealing with exceptionally adverse weather and with some aspects of concurrent delay assessment. Although the consensus was not so clear on the other two issues, there was a majority view that should give professionals working in this area greater confidence when dealing with these problems.