A contractor has received more than £60,000 in compensation from a council following delays to a civils project caused by houseboats on a neighbouring canal.
Enfield Council paid Taylor Woodrow the compensation after a series of delays caused by houseboats near the £6bn Meridian Water Regeneration Project, on which the authority is the client.
The compensation details emerged during a hearing extending injunctions against houseboats entering an area that were served to allow construction work to progress.
The judgement said that the council’s liabilities under contract penalty clauses could have reached £400,000.
However, the council and contractor confirmed to Construction News the actual figure paid was £61,000 in total.
Taylor Woodrow, a subsidiary of Vinci, was contracted to deliver roads, bridges, utilities and land remediation works on the housing site, on a contract worth £190m.
The wider project is planned to deliver 10,000 new homes, plus commercial space.
Taylor Woodrow was due to start work in December 2023, but could not start due to the presence of five houseboats at a dock nearby.
The firm’s work included driving piles into the riverbed and reconstructing the whole embankment.
It also involved chemical clearance methods to prepare for engineering works at the site, and “substantial heavy machinery” to move earth around the site.
The intrusive nature of the works meant it was “quite simply, impossible” for the works to be carried out while any boats were moored at the dock, judge Jason Beer said in a High Court judgement.
In March 2024, Taylor Woodrow warned the council that the presence of the houseboats was “preventing [it from starting] development work”.
In June 2024, six months after work was meant to start, the council got an interim injunction from another High Court judge, meaning the houseboats had to move away from the site to allow the work to start.
Though work then started, the council had to pay Taylor Woodrow compensation for the delay, due to penalty clauses in the contract, which stipulated it could have been a lot higher than £61,000.
Since the injunction began, the infrastructure work had “progressed at some pace”, Beer said.
In this latest ruling, Judge Beer granted a final injunction to cover any trespass onto the area of water where the work is being carried out, valid until 2027.
“Incursions into the relevant area risk the need to cease the constructions works […] not only would this present delay to the infrastructure work, but it would have a knock-on impact on the project itself,” he said.
A spokesperson for Enfield Council said it had to take “necessary” legal action to stop people from mooring boats in the area, so that Taylor Woodrow could undertake its work.
In 2023, the council announced a review of the project amid rising interest rates and spiralling inflation, and removed £14.9m from its 2022/23 budget.
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Joshua Stein