NEC4 Option C. The contractor has not provided quotation within the timescales required. The PM has consequently made their own assessment. The Contractor states they disagree with these assessments and will dispute them. These PMAs were implemented over six months ago, but the contract has more than two years left to run. Two questions, 1) Can the Contractor wait years to formally raise these as disputed? 2) On what grounds could a dispute against these PMAs be upheld?
Otherwise the client/PM is in the position of having hundreds of thousands of pounds of compensation items still open and unagreed as the contract progresses, therefore providing no certainty on the forecast of the contract’s total of prices and associated pain/gain share calculations.
If a quotation was not submitted within the time allowed then this obliges the PM to make an assessment. Provided the PM assessment was made in accordance with the CE assessment requirements; change to the Prices, Completion Date, Key Dates, alterations to the Accepted Programme, risk allowances for cost and time, then it would be difficult to see how the matter could be disputed, especially as the reason for making a PM assessment was due to a Contractor ‘fault’.
A dispute may be referred to an Adjudicator at any time, although the ‘ground’ for referral would only really be that the PM has not assessed the matter ‘correctly’. For any matters that could be referred to dispute resolution it is good practice to obtain an independent review to objectively assess these.
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Hi Andrew, thanks for the detailed response. We have multiple CE’s not quoted by the Contractor, primarily based around design hours. The “dispute” would be around the number of hours to allocate each task, so no “right” or “wrong” number I think and therefore no grounds for the contractor to dispute?
Allocation of time for resources to a specific task is always a challenge, especially when those same resources are used to deliver other parts of the work or service. As you have indicated it would be difficult to dispute a reasonable assessment.