On this particular Contract the PM and his commercial team have been passive in their approach to NEC 3 and have tried to operate the Contract with a traditional mindset, which makes NEC unworkable when the principles of NEC are not applied.
There some 500 No CE’s with some examples of some of the disputes as follows :-
• 25 no where the PM notified his acceptance of the quotation but has not paid anything against these.
• 98 no treated as implemented by the Contractor but not paid as the PM has not notified under 64.1 and we have issued reminder notifications as required under the Contract but no response.
• A large no of revised drawings were issued but were not reviewed by the PM and he did not invite quotes for the changes incorporated therein. The Contractor has issued CE notices where the PM did not do under 61.1 but he is relying on 61.3 not to make payment although we have pointed out to him the end statement of the clause “unless the PM should have notified the contractor but did not”.
• Staff are treated under the SOCC as a defined cost but the PM has decided they are FOC and therefore crossed them out.
• Payment has been by assessing some of the individual CE’s where we know exactly where each party stands but the rest have been paid as a lump sum with no detail thus forming a large delta between respective PWDD.
• He has refused to make assessment against each individual CE.
• PM Commercial staff who attend meetings are not empowered to make agreement
• We have offered various settlement routes such as cap and collar
• The Contractor seeks the PM to assess all compensation events and to be provided with full visibility of the total of the prices plus the Project Manager’s detailed assessment of costs and programme where he disputes the Contractor’s assessment.
• Payment of accrued interest.
Hopefully I have managed to paint a clear picture of the many and varied disputes and I can confirm that all protocol has been followed to the letter so there is nothing lacking in the correct notifications have been timeously raised.
The next stop is adjudication so my question is how would you format something as diverse as the above to take to adjudication as in real terms there is a dispute on something like half of the 500 broadly under the above bullet points. My limited knowledge says that you can only have one thing in each adjudication or have I got that wrong.
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