IN Brief:
- JCT has added a full-day contract administration course in London on 19 November.
- The unamended Design and Build Contract 2024 will be examined from employer and contractor perspectives.
- Exercises will cover notices, extensions of time, loss and expense, design submissions, records, disputes, and risk allocation.
JCT has added a full-day course on administering its 2024 contracts to its autumn training programme, using the unamended Design and Build Contract 2024 as the basis for practical work on notices, delay, cost, design information, and dispute management.
Administering JCT Contracts 2024 will take place at JCT’s London offices on 19 November from 10am to 4.30pm. Seán Mac Labhraí, director of Highgate Law, will deliver the course, which is priced at £455 plus VAT.
The programme approaches the contract from both employer and contractor perspectives. It covers delays and extensions of time, reimbursement of loss and expense, inadequacies, divergences and discrepancies in contract documents, the Design Submission Procedure, and the notices and replies associated with those mechanisms.
Record keeping and dispute management form a second strand. JCT says the course will examine how careful administration can reduce the likelihood of disputes and mitigate their effect, alongside common problems encountered on live projects and the allocation of contractual risk between the parties.
The session is intended to be practical rather than lecture-led, with drafting exercises, problem questions, and worked examples based on project scenarios. Using the unamended contract provides a fixed starting point from which attendees can examine the standard machinery before considering the project-specific amendments that may apply on individual jobs.
Design and Build Contract 2024 was the first major contract family released under the JCT 2024 Edition in April 2024. The revision modernised several administrative provisions, including greater flexibility around electronic notices, while incorporating legislative changes associated with Part 2A of the Building Regulations, termination accounting and payment, and updated insolvency provisions.
Previously optional provisions on collaborative working and sustainable development and environmental considerations were also brought into the main contract. JCT has separately embedded notification and negotiation of disputes within the principal contractual structure, increasing the emphasis placed on early administration and dialogue when problems begin to emerge.
Those provisions sit alongside the more familiar machinery of time, money, design, and notice. On a live project, the commercial result of an event frequently depends on more than establishing that something happened: the parties have to determine which clause applies, whether a notice is required, what records exist, how the event affects the programme, and whether the contractual response has been made within the prescribed process.
Extensions of time illustrate the problem. Delays may arise from changes, information, access, design development, third parties, or contractor performance, but the contract still requires the parties to distinguish between causes, assess their consequences, and administer the resulting entitlement rather than relying on an informal agreement reached during a progress meeting.
Loss and expense creates a related evidential burden. Commercial teams need contemporaneous records capable of connecting an event to additional cost, while those assessing a claim need enough information to test whether the amount and contractual basis are established. Weak records can turn a relatively conventional project event into a prolonged argument over causation and valuation.
Design administration brings its own interfaces under design and build procurement. The contractor carries substantial design responsibility, but the contract still regulates submissions, responses, discrepancies, and the flow of information between the parties. An informal drawing review can become problematic if the project team treats it as though it has the same contractual effect as a process defined by the executed agreement.
JCT has developed separate Contract Administration Model Forms for the 2024 suite, including material for use with the Design and Build Contract. That reflects the extent to which standard forms depend on repeatable administration after signature rather than simply setting liabilities at the point of award.
The November course arrives as DB 2024 becomes a more established working document rather than a newly released replacement for the 2016 edition. The practical requirement is increasingly to administer current projects under the revised clauses, where email notices, change, design exchanges, cost records, and dispute procedures have to function within the same live programme.
No training course can remove disagreement from construction contracts, particularly once projects depart from their original programme and commercial assumptions. Better administration can at least leave the parties arguing about the actual contractual issue rather than first having to reconstruct what happened from incomplete notices, scattered emails, and records nobody expected to need.
