Approaches to Delay Claims Assessment Employed in the UK Construction Industry

Construction project delays emanates from multiplicity of different sources of risk events. This, combined with high uncertainty in cause-effect relationships between the events and their impacts on project completion dates, have created immense difficulties in apportioning project delay responsibilities amongst contracting parties. This challenge is now dealt with by various delay analysis approaches, yet delay claims settlement continues to be a troublesome undertaking. Empirical research on these approaches as to their application in practice is limited, although such studies provide important reference sources to practitioners and researchers. As a contribution to addressing this gap, this paper reports on practitioners’ views on the approaches based on a UK nation-wide questionnaire survey of construction and consulting companies. The key findings of the study include: (1) delay claims are often resolved late and not close in time of occurrence of the delay events, creating more difficulties; (2) simplistic delay analysis approaches are widely used in practice and form the basis of successful claim resolutions, although they have major weaknesses; (3) the sophisticated approaches, although are more robust, are generally not popular in practice. To promote the use of these reliable approaches and help reduce or avoid disputes amongst claims parties, programming and record keeping practices must be improved as they do not facilitate the use of the approaches.