UK practice in dealing with claims for delay

The paper describes four methods of dealing with delay claims that effectively sum up the main approaches to this problem that have been offered in the literature. This is then followed by a description and discussion of results from a new survey aimed at finding out exactly how professionals in the UK construction industry approach these difficult issues. It appears that those who deal with delay claims in the UK are likely to use a critical path method network to do this and generally approve of a methodology that attempts to understand how well the contractor would have fared but for' the existence of employer-responsible delays. There is less agreement about who should be said to own the float, but as is explained in the paper, it is possible for this matter to be dealt with by the insertion of a clause in the contract documents.