Bowes, D (2007) Practitioners' perception of adjudication in UK construction. In: Boyd, D (ed.) Proceedings of 23rd Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2007, Belfast, UK.
Abstract
he Construction Act of 1996 provided for adjudication to be available to the parties on the majority of construction contracts and it is now a well established construction dispute resolution process. Its perceived success is well documented. However, lately there have been criticisms targeting issues such as increased costs, ambush by the claiming party and unrealistic timescales. A questionnaire survey was conducted amongst Construction Professionals, Lawyers, Arbitrators/Adjudicators and Clients in order to establish the role of adjudication in the U.K. construction industry and to examine whether the above criticisms are widely held views. The results show that one of the advantages of the UK Adjudication system is that the parties have a right to seek adjudication "at any time" and respondents strongly disagreed that parties should be allowed to contract out. Data was inconclusive with regard to the criticisms that in practice the majority of adjudications exceed the 28 + 14 days timescale, or that Claimants frequently use "ambush" tactics when serving claim documents in order to disadvantage respondents. The implications of this are discussed.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | adjudication; ambush; dispute resolution; UK construction industry |
| Index terms: | construction industry, resolution, arbitrator, construction dispute, construction professional, adjudicator, documents, practitioner, questionnaire, construction contract, dispute, lawyer, survey, adjudication |
| Subjects: | dispute resolution, practitioner, profession, data collection methods, contract type, professional development, industry analysis, conflict resolution |
| Topics: | Legal Issues, Information Management, Research Practice, Procurement, Stakeholder Management, Roles and Professions |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PTEA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here