Top construction lawyer Tony Bingham has attacked the Olympic Delivery Authority’s construction policy. He said: “We have started on the wrong foot already.”

The barrister and arbitrator questioned the ODA’s use of the NEC family of contracts for the 2012 build programme. Bingham refuted the notion that the NEC prevents disputes. He said: “There are disputes on it because I deal with them all the time”. Speaking of NEC 2, he said: “It is an unpopular document. Builders just don’t understand it. It is a mystery to the industry, although the man who wrote it was brilliant.” He said he hoped the NEC 3, the ODA’s chosen document, was “a damn sight better”.

At last week’s RICS Legal Issues in Construction 2006 conference, Bingham also criticised the ODA’s emphasis on the “partnering” approach. “Partnering works beautifully as long as the contractors do as they are told. When the chips are down, partnering is well and truly dumped because (the parties) are all at one another’s throats.”

Bingham warned against design work continuing once building got underway. He called on the ODA to adopt a policy of “delivering on time with a profit” and added that money could not be made out of variations and disputes. “The key to making a profit is to price the job and get on with it. The curse of the industry is the variation.”

Don’t forget the chippies and plasterers. They are not mentioned in the ODA manifesto

Tony Bingham

Bingham called for the ODA to pay more attention to subcontractors: “Don’t forget the chippies and plasterers. They are not mentioned in the ODA manifesto... More important than any contract is that you have got the blokes on site.”

David Higgins, chief executive of the ODA, recently defended the use of the NEC in an interview with QS News. He said: “We are using a modified version of NEC 3 for the delivery partner contract. It was seen as the best existing contract. Its entire structure is driven around openness and transparency... The key thing about the NEC is that it can be terminated and we can vary its scope.”

A survey on the QS News website found that 87% of our readers thought the NEC was the wrong contract for the Olympics.

Source

QS News

Postscript

Jack Lemley resigned as chair of the ODA on Wednesday. He said he wanted to return to running his US-based construction consultancy.