Planning advice for contractors

A FIDIC extension of time is decided on the programme and the records. This guide takes the 2017 Red and Yellow Books from the planner's side: the Sub-Clause 8.5 grounds and what each carries, the Notice of Claim and fully detailed Claim under 20.2 with the Engineer's 14 days and the late-submission review, the 42 plus 42 days under 3.7, concurrent delay, the programme evidence that wins the days, and what an EU grant adds on funded work.

In June 2026 the High Court refused to enforce a £1.65m NEC adjudication award in Premier Modular v Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. The legal headline is natural justice. The lesson for contractors is a project controls one. The whole dispute turned on which programme was the Accepted Programme, and the date the claim relied on was never in it. Under NEC, a compensation event is only as good as the Accepted Programme it stands on, and acceptance is a status you earn,

On NEC Options C and D, real cost can still become vulnerable when the accepted programme and the cost record stop telling the same story. This article looks at the hidden commercial fracture between planning and QS records, and why that is where Defined Cost recovery often starts to fail.

A practical NEC3 vs NEC4 comparison focused on programme acceptance, treated acceptance, early warning discipline and CE integration, based on NEC’s “Next Generation” white paper.

Social value in construction is the benefit a contractor commits to deliver through a contract, scored at tender and monitored through delivery. This guide covers the law and policy behind it, what scores under PPN 026 from January 2027, why commitments fail, and how jobs and skills commitments are delivered and evidenced on a live project, from the roles in the programme to the records each KPI assessment asks for.

NEC contract administration today still works the way it worked in 1993. A programme gets submitted as a document. The project manager reviews it as a document. Acceptance is recorded as a document. The contractual machinery is electronic in form and paper in function. This is changing faster than most contractors have absorbed, and not in the way the industry talks about.

The UK infrastructure pipeline stands at £718 billion and CITB expects construction to need about 206,000 extra workers between 2026 and 2030. For many contractors that makes remote NEC planning support the practical way to get a senior NEC planner onto a job. Where it pays against an in-house hire, and how to tell a well-run engagement from one that only turns up after the programme has drifted.