If your works have been delayed you may have incurred additional costs. To recover this money, you need to put together a claim for prolongation costs.

The first step is to prepare a programme showing the actual or anticipated effect of the events. Then, you can see the extension of time you are entitled to. This will provide protection against damages.

The programme also needs to support your claim to recover additional costs. The costs you need to recover can be split between prolonged resources and thickened resources. Prolonged resources are people and equipment that are required for a longer period because of the events. Thickened resources are additional people and equipment that have been brought in because of the event.

Prolongation of Staff

The first section to be considered is staff. These are likely to be prolonged longer than site operatives. Management staff are likely to be prolonged. They are likely to be mobilised soon after the contract is signed. They are also likely to be required at the end of the project after the works on site are complete. People such as the project manager, quantity surveyor, site administration are likely to be extended.

It is important to remember that you have a duty to mitigate. You may have the opportunity to delay the mobilisation of some of the resources. For instance, you may have a setting out engineer who is a subcontractor. You may be able to delay their mobilisation.

So, how do we actually assess the additional costs? A straightforward way is to find one of the last dates on the programme where management are required. This may be the submission of documentation after the works. If the submission of these documents has been delayed by four weeks, your staff may be required for an additional four weeks. This means you can include four weeks of their costs in the claim.

We also need to include weekly rates in the claim for each of the affected staff. You may have agreed rates in your contract or you may have provided rates within your tender. If you haven't previously provided rates to your client, you may need to provide substantiation of your rates.

Prolongation of Site Preliminaries

Once we have worked out the increased staff costs, the next section will be site preliminaries. Site preliminaries will likely be divided between people and equipment.

Regarding people, a site supervisor may only be required for site works. This means they will go into the preliminaries section rather than the staff section. You will also need to include site welfare, lights, radios, and any other equipment that will be on site for the duration of the site activities. If you have hired plant, it is easy to provide copies of rates. You should also have an uplift for profit and overhead that you can apply to these rates.

You will also need to provide rates if you have any equipment that you own. Again, it is easier if these rates have been provided at tender stage and included in the contract.

Prolongation of Activities

The final section is people and equipment who are only required for specific activities. For instance, a piling rig will only be on site for the piling works. If this activity has been prolonged, you can claim for the additional time for the rig, when it is on site. It may be that the piling activity has been extended by three weeks. This can be shown easily on the programme.

Another important point is that you may have disruption which has forced you to bring in additional people. If you have more staff than your tender, you may be able to claim these people, also known as thickened resource. If these people were also working during the period of delay, you should be able to include them in your prolongation claim.

A couple of other points. Not all of your staff will be extended during periods of delay. You may have an external temporary works designer, who carries out discrete design works on an ad hoc basis. But you may not have paid any more for their works. If you haven't incurred any increased costs, they should not form part of your prolongation claim.

One last point regarding prolongation. The client may argue that periods of delay allow staff to catch up with their work. Therefore, they may seek to reduce your recovery of some members of staff.

Tracker

It is a good idea to keep a tracker showing overall delays and increased expenditure. That way we can ensure that we are recovering all our delays. This tracker should clearly show all staff on the project. And how long they have been extended for. Also, the tracker is useful if you don't have one extension of time claim, but instead a series of claims. You can make sure you are recovering all your delays.

That's all for today.

See you next week.