I have a situation on my contract, that I would like an opinion on.
Consultant has issued a report for review, agreement is a 2 week review period.
Client has taken 7 weeks to review the document and issue the comments.
Consultant has then take 10 weeks to respond to the comments.
Client respond to the consultants comments 3 week
The Consultant is now saying they want an instruction to complete the agreed works due to the delay cause. The client might be liable to the 5 weeks due to the delay in the initial review period. So there maybe a cost associated with this.
The question is can the client associate a cost to the delay of the 10 weeks caused by the consultant, and deduct this off the compensation event, or do we have to raise a compensation event against the consultant?
Hope that make sense.
There are a couple more questions here within your question, i.e.
- Is it a requirement of the Scope for the Consultant to issue for acceptance prior to proceeding or not? Are they issuing more “for information” in which case they should be proceeding whether or not they have comments from the Client (or more specifically the Service Manager acting on Client’s behalf under NEC4). If it is a requirement of the Scope then the 5 weeks delay in responding will be a CE.
- Has Consultant notified an early warning to say the delayed response to this report could affect the project going forward, in order to prompt a meeting to discuss the issues, potential effects of continued delay and agree actions. To not let the Service Manager know the implications of no response could then be held against the Consultant in any assessment IF they are agreed as being a CE.
So you first have to decide if the initial non-response IS a compensation event or not. If the answer is yes, then the Consultant should act promptly and competently (63.9) and their ten weeks to address comments will certainly not be part of the CE assessment.