Inaugural Meeting of Adjudication Users Liaison Group, Kings College, Strand, London: 27 April 2004

The above meeting took place as planned and was attended by approximately 25 people. The make of the audience comprising representative of the main ANB’s, adjudicators, adjudication users such as contractors, solicitors/barristers, quantity surveyors and claim consultants. The meeting was chaired by Peter Fenn from Umist supported by Michael O’Shea a solicitor from Masons and Martin Burns from RICS. The following agenda was followed:

Welcome and introduction

Brief Synopsis

The role of the ANB’s

Comment and Questions for the floor

Summary

Proposal for future meetings

The duration of the meeting was kept to one hour and a strict guillotine was applied with the meeting finishing at 7pm.

The main issues that arose are summarised below:

Agreement to strive for consistency of Adjudication process and quality/standard of adjudicators with emphasis on training, education and monitoring concluding with the concept of the introduction of a practicing certificate for adjudicators to be renewed on a regular basis. The analogy of an MOT was used.

All ANB’s present were invited to consider a mutual training programme in the form of enhanced CPD. This initiative was being debated by RIBA/RICS and was in an embryonic state. Terminology such as ‘gold standard’ was mentioned however the terminology was considered of secondary importance to the objective under consideration.

Examination of existing training programmes and educational courses were to be examined in order to identify the future standard that should be set for potential Adjudicators. This was considered necessary only if the demand for Adjudication continued to grow. However after consideration the emphasis changed to the present and to ensuring that the existing body of trained Adjudicators were suitably up to scratch and were able to meet the standard expected of them by industry. It was felt that if the demand for Adjudication did not grow the need/desire for a new crop of dispute resolvers was low.

1. Debate then moved to consolidation of the respective ANB’s with the objective to control standards of the existing Adjudicators and also the generation of consistency of approach in training new Adjudicators. It was reported that at least 30 ANB’s existed and that it may prove difficult to create an umbrella group to administer the affairs of all bodies atisfactorily.

2. The likely outcome would be that the leading ANB’s would create the possible umbrella and if this were successful then the others would ultimately be invited to join in.

3. The debate then centred on the process of appointments and the perceived fairness of this with issues such as transparency of appointments to whether the Respondent should have some say in the selection process. This effectively consisted of a series of bad experiences suffered by practitioners in the process and did not in any way add to the debate.

The meeting concluded with a open question on what the next step should be. This matter
was not resolved, however my research tells me that the likely next step will be a meeting of the ANB representatives to examine the issues of training and creation of beat practice
standards.