ARTICLE
“ If no party requests reasons then it is clear that the Adjudicator should not provide reasons, notes or any other outlines.”
Decision. Unless the parties are agreed on this issue through their written submissions, the author sees no reason why the requesting party should not pay for the additional work it has requested the Adjudicator to carry out, irrespective of the outcome of the adjudication. Such an allocation could readily be made by the Adjudicator as part of his discretion under Paragraph 25 of Part I of the Scheme. Paragraph 24 of the CIC Adjudication Rules Fourth Edition provides: “He shall be required to give reasons unless both Parties agree at any time that he shall not be required to give reasons.” The Adjudicator is under a clear obligation to provide reasons in his Decision unless notified otherwise in an agreement of the parties not to do so. In these circumstances the author
LEGAL LIGHTS • ISSUE 20
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believes that this additional cost should form part of the costs of the Adjudicator conducting the proceedings to be allocated by him between the parties. Whilst to date there have been cases concerned with whether or not the Adjudicator has given sufficient reasons for his Decision, to date there has been no case in which a party has alleged the Adjudicator gave far too many reasons and, as a consequence, the parties were charged too much by the Adjudicator in respect of his fees for providing a `long-winded’ Reasoned Decision, for example, some decisions have been over 200 pages long. The author has little doubt that in respect of this matter there will and have been complaints by the parties who whilst wishing to have reasons then do not want to pay the costs thereof because they consider the cost is disproportionate to the amount in dispute.
The author has yet to receive from any party a request for a Reasoned Decision, which qualifies its request by stating that the Adjudicator is to limit the numbers of pages of his Decision to a definite number, e.g. 20 or 30 pages etc. In light of the high fees charged by Adjudicators perhaps the parties should now consider such an option. Unfortunately, the reality is that the representatives of the parties will continue to ask the Adjudicator for reasons, without any qualification, and the parties themselves, at the end, will not wish to pay for the additional work the Adjudicator has been involved in producing the Reasoned Decision. May be there is now a case that such requests for a Reasoned Decision should come with a financial health warning to both the Adjudicator and the parties!
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