What is concurrent delay, and who owns the float?

Concurrency: time, but not money

The classic position, and the one the SCL Protocol takes, is that where an employer-risk event and a contractor-risk event delay completion concurrently, the contractor gets an extension of time but no prolongation cost.

The logic is that the extension protects the contractor from liquidated damages for a delay the employer caused — but the contractor cannot recover the cost of being on site, because it would have been on site anyway, delayed by its own culpable event. Time without money.

That is a default and not a law. Contracts increasingly draft around it explicitly, and jurisdictions differ, so read your clause before you build a case on the general principle.

The evidential burden is the real barrier

To argue concurrency at all you must show what was actually driving the completion date at each point in time — day by day, event by event, against a properly maintained programme.

Which means concurrency arguments are won and lost in the site diary, not in the submission. A contractor without contemporaneous production records cannot demonstrate what was critical when, and a tribunal will not take its word for it.

Float belongs to the project

Total float is a project resource, not a contractor asset and not an employer asset. Most standard forms say so, and most projects argue about it anyway.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable: float is consumed on a first-come basis. A contractor that quietly spends float absorbing its own inefficiency has weakened its own position — because when an employer-risk event arrives and finds none left, the delay to completion is real and the argument about who caused it is the argument that ends up in arbitration.

So the discipline is to protect float deliberately, and to record its consumption. A programme that shows float being eroded, and by what, is worth a great deal more than one that simply shows the completion date holding until it suddenly does not.