Sir Michael Latham and Adjudication
This Article is all about Sir Michael Latham and Adjudication. He is well known in the construction industry for issuing The Latham Report ‘constructing the team’.
This report recommended making Adjudication a formal dispute resolution procedure in the Construction Industry as an alternative to litigation or Arbitration. Stravelles run a course in Adjudication which aims to allow the student to run their own adjudication as the referring or responding party without paying for legal representation.
We support legal representation in more complex cases but we want to encourage especially smaller companies to feel more confident fighting for their contractual rights.
Introduction
He was born Michael Anthony Latham on the 20th November 1942.
Starting off as a councillor in Westminster, Latham was a member of the conservative party and was a member of Parliament for various constituencies including Rutland and Melton.
He retired from being an MP in 1992 and he was Knighted in 1993 for politics.
In 1994 Latham published the joint industry and government report on the UK Construction industry ‘Constructing the Team’.
In our opinion, the biggest achievement of the Latham report, as described further here was that it recommended Adjudication be encouraged as the main method of dispute resolution in construction. This recommendation was taken up by the Government and led to The Construction Act 1996 establishing the rules of adjudication in construction.
The second achievement, again, in our opinion, was to encourage the concept and use of partnership approaches in construction. The report called out the industry for being fragmented into its separate clans of Clients, Architects, Quantity Surveyors, Engineers all with competing goals and interests. The report suggested several ways for the industry to partner better and recommended the Government become a leading best practice Client.
Memberships
- Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, RICS, RIBA, ICE, CIOB
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
- Member of Parliament
- Chairman of the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) (2002–10)
- Chairman of Construction Skills (2003–10)
- Chairman, then deputy chairman of Willmott Dixon Limited (1999–2002, 2002–09)
- Chairman of Collaborative Working Centre Limited (since 2003)
- Deputy chairman of BIW Technologies (2000–05).