Legal Liability and the Role of Professional Indemnity

Engineers during the latter 1980s suffered the trauma of persistent requests for the provision of collateral warranties. These were given as a consequence of the engineer’s input on a building project, such warranties being executed in favour of funding institutions and future tenants or purchasers of the property. These were individuals with whom the engineer, without the existence of the warranty, would not have had a contractual relationship. These were deemed necessary because of the demise in tortious liability. The warranties were an attempt to ensure that the tenant, the purchaser or the fund whose prime asset would be the completed structure would have had some perceived recourse in the event of there being defects within the structure that may or may not have been due to default on the part of the structural engineer. Because of the amount of wasted efforts and costs being incurred in examining the wording of warranties, which were all different, standard forms of warranty have been produced with the approval of the British Property Federation, with the cooperation of the professional institutions. It is hoped that these standard forms will meet with greater, if not universal, use. Jeffrey Brown

The recent explosion in the number of universities provides an opportune occasion to reflect briefly on the changes that have taken place in academia generally and in structural engineering at the University of Birmingham in particular. The accelerating pace of change has become especially marked in the last decade and this is well illustrated by the changes which have taken place within civil engineering at Birmingham. Not least among these changes was the transition in 1988 from a Department to a School when Civil Engineering became a budget centre responsible for all its own staff costs, for example, and the newly formed School manifestly displayed a financial accountability comparable with any large department within an industrial organisation. Professor B.P. Hughes and Professor L.A. Clark

This paper deals with the structures on the section of the Black Country route contained within the boundaries of the Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council, and the process by which the design of the structures has evolved, as influenced by the complex ground conditions that exist over the length of the site. The scheme is currently under construction, hence the difficulties which are being encountered, and the solutions to the problems arising from them, will be described. A.G. Mordey