, Building
You priced a school extension at £840,000 with a 34-week programme. Groundworks were meant to finish in week 9. It rained through most of October, the dig held water, and the muck-away lorries could not get off the site without dragging half of it onto the road. Groundworks finished in week 15.
The client's project manager wants to know why the steel erection has not started. Your site manager says it is the weather. The project manager says the contract has a completion date in it. Both of them are right, and neither statement gets you anywhere on its own.
Only the delay on the critical path actually moves the end date
A programme is not a list of things in order. It is a network of activities with dependencies between them, and somewhere inside that network is a chain where every activity must finish before the next one starts, with no slack. That chain is the critical path. Delay an activity on it and the completion date moves by the same amount. Delay an activity off it and you eat into float, which is spare time, and nothing happens to the end date until the float runs out.
This is why "we lost six weeks" is not a claim. It is an observation. The question is whether those six weeks sat on the critical path, and by how much the float absorbed them. If your groundworks had four weeks of float before the steel delivery slot, you lost two weeks of completion, not six.
Most small contractors run a bar chart with no logic links in it, which means they cannot answer the question at all. A programme with links, baselined at the start and updated honestly as you go, is the difference between a position you can defend and an argument you will lose.
Exceptionally adverse weather usually buys time and nothing else
Standard British forms split delay into two questions, and they are separate questions with separate answers.
Under the JCT suite, a Relevant Event gives you an extension of time. It moves the completion date and stops liquidated damages running. Exceptionally adverse weather conditions is one of them. A Relevant Matter gives you loss and expense: the money for prolonged preliminaries, site huts, supervision, scaffolding standing idle. Weather is a Relevant Event but not a Relevant Matter. You get the time and you carry the cost.
Under NEC4 the mechanism is a compensation event, and weather is treated by measurement rather than adjective. The contract data records a weather measurement and a return period, typically ten years, against recorded data for the place. Rainfall above the level that occurs on average once in ten years is a compensation event. Rainfall that is merely miserable is not.
Note the word "exceptionally". October being wet in Britain is not exceptional. If you want to argue it was, you need Met Office records for the nearest station and a comparison against the long-run figures, and you need to have notified in the period the contract specifies rather than mentioning it at the final account.
Liquidated damages are a price agreed in advance, not a fine
The contract particulars will state a rate: so much per week or per day of late completion. That figure is deducted or recovered by the employer without having to prove actual loss, which is the entire point of it. It must be a genuine attempt to pre-estimate loss rather than a penalty designed to frighten you, and the courts will look at whether it was extravagant compared with any legitimate interest in performance.
Two practical consequences follow. First, a low rate is a cap as much as a charge. If the client's real loss from late handover is £9,000 a week and the contract says £1,500, that £1,500 is what you owe. Second, if the employer causes delay and there is no working mechanism to extend the completion date, time can be set at large, the completion date falls away and liquidated damages go with it. That is why employers' agents grant extensions of time they would rather not: keeping the date alive protects the damages.
Concurrent delay is where the real argument sits
Concurrency is the case where a contractor delay and an employer delay overlap. Your steel subcontractor was three weeks late in the same window that the client's revised cladding specification arrived. Whose three weeks are they.
The common working position in England is that the contractor gets the time but not the money. You are relieved of liquidated damages because an employer risk event caused delay, but you cannot recover prolongation costs you would have incurred anyway because of your own default. The Society of Construction Law publishes a Delay and Disruption Protocol which sets out this reasoning in detail. It is not law and it is not binding on anyone, but adjudicators read it and it is a useful common vocabulary when two parties are talking past each other.
Contracts increasingly include express concurrency clauses that allocate the risk one way, and those clauses will generally be enforced. Read them before you sign, not after the cladding drawing changes.
Records are what win these, not the strength of the grievance
An adjudicator appointed under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 has 28 days from referral to reach a decision, extendable to 42 with the referring party's consent and further by agreement. That is a very short time to reconstruct what happened on a site eighteen months ago from memory.
What survives that timetable:
- A baselined programme with logic links, plus dated progress updates showing what actually happened week by week.
- Site diaries and daily weather records, including the state of the ground and which operations were stopped.
- Notices served inside the contractual period, with the event identified and the likely effect stated, even where the full effect is not yet known.
- Labour and plant allocation sheets showing who stood idle and for how long.
- Instructions and drawing revisions with the dates they were issued and received.
The habit that costs firms most money is silence. Contracts require notice within a stated period, often in a stated form. Some make notice a condition precedent, which means no notice, no entitlement, however genuine the delay. The site manager who thinks raising it will sour the relationship is deferring a much worse conversation to the final account.
Where this shows up in the game
Construction arrives in Business Baron with the Property & Construction Track, an add-on to the full game. Work is a project with months in it, and the cash flow shows every week it runs over. Whether lost time costs you or the client depends on the contract you signed, which is why reading it before the job is worth more than reading it after.