A judge has thrown out Lendlease’s attempt to sue Aecom for £3m over fire safety defects at a cancer center where it worked in Yorkshire.
Judge Stephen Eyre said he would have found the consultancy liable for eight defects if Lendlease had brought the legal action some nine months earlier, but ruled that a 12-year liability period had elapsed.
The High Court dispute focused on liability for a lack of fire compartmentation and other defects in a ground floor room of a new 13-storey oncology wing for St James’s University Hospital in Leeds (at photo). The hospital was built by Lendlease and completed in December 2007, funded through the Government’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
The case came after Lendlease was ordered to pay almost £8m to its former client in relation to 25 defects, following an earlier court battle that ended in 2022, which was added to a separate settlement in November 2021.
Lendlease claimed Aecom was responsible for 18 of the 25 defects it had paid for.
Judge Eyre said Lendlease failed to establish Aecom’s liability for 10 of the defects. However, he added that Aecom would have been liable for at least £550,000 in damages as a result of its failings, had Lendlease’s case not been time-barred.
Lendlease was appointed to the project in 2004 under a design and build contract. It then engaged Aecom to provide mechanical and electrical consulting services to the 67,000 square meter, 300-bed unit.
In 2018, St James’s Oncology SPC, the company set up to oversee the construction and maintenance of the new cancer wing, was notified that repair work was needed in one of the plant’s rooms due to fire safety concerns.
Problems included the lack of fire separation between teams; inadequate protection of firefighting elevator power supplies; and the lack of fire resistance in the ducts that pass through the transformation rooms and towards the service elevations.
Engie Building, which was appointed to carry out the maintenance for the 30-year life of the PFI agreement, was contracted in 2022 to install fire resistance measures.
Both companies took Lendlease to court to recover repair costs. In October 2022, Judge Joanna Smith found Lendlease liable for £5,048,534.39 plus costs to St James’s Oncology SPC for nine defects. The parties previously settled a claim relating to 16 additional defects out of court, with Lendlease paying St James’s Oncology SPC and Engie £2.9m.
Lendlease issued a claim against Aecom, claiming that £3m of the sum it paid was the responsibility of the consultant. Lendlease argued that the lack of a fire compartment in the plant room, which did not meet NHS standards, was a result of Aecom’s design.
The judge concluded that the nature of the agreement between Lendlease and Aecom meant that there was a 12-year limitation period following a breach, during which either party could bring a claim.
Because the case was filed on May 30, 2019, any breach by Aecom would have to have occurred after May 30, 2007 for the company to be held liable. The monthly reports indicated that the plant room was completed in August 2006, meaning that the defects in question were outside the statute of limitations.
However, the judge pointed out that Aecom “not only knew that in reality there was no compartmentalization but caused it [mechanical, electrical and plumbing-installation subcontractor] Rotatable to omit the installation of shock absorbers at the entrances between partitions.
The list of defects for which he said Aecom would have been held responsible included: the construction of the plant room as a single fire compartment; an inadequate plant replacement strategy; poor fire-stopping capacity of the piping leading to the service column; inadequate grounding in some of the medical locations; 15 cases where a fire barrier should have been installed; and the absence of breakout tanks for laboratory hot water systems.
