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The UK and Canada are both redesigning critical minerals strategies in response to concentrated supply chains, net-zero delivery pressures and national security concerns, but from different starting points. The UK is focused on import resilience, while Canada looks to establish itself as a critical minerals mining and processing superpower.
This sovereignty agenda is not merely a policy story. Faster project timelines, increased public funding, and heightened security scrutiny are creating new opportunities for disputes.
What counts as 'critical'?
Critical mineral designations increasingly determine access to funding, procurement opportunities, and regulatory scrutiny. As governments decide what minerals are 'critical', financing eligibility, investment screening requirements, foreign ownership restrictions, and long-term offtake arrangements may change, creating fertile ground for change-in-law claims, material adverse change disputes, and termination battles.
Bottlenecks create disputes
The greatest disputes risk likely stems from the reality that developing mines take time. Governments are pursuing accelerated delivery of the minerals required for industrial growth, defence, and the energy transition, yet new mines often take well over a decade to reach production. The resulting mismatch creates predictable disputes around schedule slippage, acceleration measures, scope changes, and cost overruns.
In the UK, those risks extend beyond extraction. Government policy places significant emphasis on recycling, processing, and refining capacity, particularly in regions identified for future minerals development. These projects remain exposed to planning restrictions, environmental permitting requirements, and community opposition. Questions concerning waste classification, environmental impacts and planning approvals can quickly translate into permitting appeals, contractual delay claims, and operator-supplier disputes.
Canada faces similar challenges, with additional regulatory complexity. The process of developing a mine engages issues falling within both federal and provincial jurisdiction. Indigenous consultation obligations add another significant risk factor. As consultation processes become contested or delayed, permitting schedules can slip and trigger a cascade of contractual claims across the project chain. Investment screening and foreign ownership restrictions create further uncertainty for internationally financed projects.
Procurement pressure points
Delivery pressure is also changing procurement behaviour.
Developers are increasingly turning to early contractor involvement, alliance contracting, target-cost models, package splitting and early works programmes to accelerate project delivery. While these models can support progress, they also create familiar construction dispute risks.
At the front end, disputes commonly arise over tender assumptions, subsurface conditions and design responsibility. During construction, change orders, unforeseen ground conditions, disruption claims, and interface disputes between mine, infrastructure, and processing packages often dominate. Towards completion, performance testing, ramp-up failures, defects, and guarantee disputes become recurring flashpoints.
Offtake and supply-chain risk
Disputes are also migrating downstream.
The UK is seeking greater diversification of supply, while Canada is positioning itself as a reliable, allied supplier through international critical minerals partnerships and greater openness to foreign investment from allied countries.
As supply chains and financing arrangements become more complex, pricing adjustment disputes, take-or-pay claims, specification disagreements and logistics failures, and streaming and royalty disputes, are likely to increase. Export controls, sanctions and other security measures may lead to force majeure disputes, while ESG and provenance requirements attached to public financing may generate disagreements over audit rights, reporting obligations and contractual compliance.
Reducing disputes before they arise
The correlation between increased economic activity and the potential for greater disputes is hardly unique to the mining sector. The solution lies in proactive risk management rather than aggressive risk transfer.
Developers should incorporate robust change-in-law provisions, relief-event mechanisms and approval-linked schedule adjustment procedures into project documentation. Community engagement should be treated as a project deliverable, with dedicated governance, resourcing, and record keeping.
Procurement models should reflect permitting realities, while financing, ESG, and reporting obligations should be aligned across lenders, contractors, and offtakers to avoid inconsistent default triggers. Finally, dispute boards, adjudication, emergency arbitration, and enforcement planning should be viewed as project-management tools rather than contractual afterthoughts.
As governments compete to secure critical minerals supply chains, disputes risk is becoming inseparable from mining strategy. The projects most likely to succeed will be those that identify sovereignty-driven risks early and allocate them before they become claims.
Author note
Written by Freeths’ Commercial Dispute Resolution Director Ciara Ros and Construction and Engineering Senior Associate Sachin Shah, and Chris Hunter and Braden Jebson of Torys LLP.