Planning advice for contractors

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,

Most contractors submit programme revisions that update progress, move the data date forward, and miss everything else clause 32 requires. The project manager receives a schedule that shows where the job is but not what the contractor is doing about it. That is not a revision. It is a progress snapshot. This article explains what a clause 32 programme revision actually needs to contain, why most revisions are rejected, and what to do when the project manager is deliberately a

Most contractors treat clause 31 as a procedural hurdle to clear at the start of the job. Submit the programme, wait for acceptance, move on. That approach quietly hands commercial control to the project manager. This article explains what the accepted programme actually protects, how the deemed acceptance mechanism works, and why a programme that was accepted at mobilisation provides almost no commercial protection by month six.

An accepted programme is not a procedural document. It is the shared reference frame against which every compensation event is assessed, every delay analysed, every progress conversation grounded. When it is missing, the reference frame itself becomes contested, and that contest favours the project manager. This is what the absence of an accepted programme actually means commercially, why it shifts control, and how contractors recover the position before the damage compounds.

Every contractor running an NEC4 contract loses some compensation event entitlement that the contract would otherwise have delivered. The amount lost is not random. It is the predictable consequence of seven specific failure modes that recur across contractor types, contract sizes and sectors. Each is preventable through operational discipline.