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 NEC4 time impact assessments fail at the project manager's desk, not in the planning team. The analysis is usually sound. The structure is what fails. This article explains the five elements every accepted assessment contains: the dividing date with justification, the accepted programme with version, the compensation event fragnet built in isolation, the impacted programme with the calculation, and the narrative that walks the project manager through the cause and effect

A UK Tier 2 contractor with a strong NEC track record won its first major FIDIC contract and was in dispute eighteen months later. A UK contractor with extensive FIDIC experience won an NEC4 contract and had the project manager invoking clause 64 within six months. Both failures had the same underlying cause: contractors who switch between NEC and FIDIC without recognising that the two contracts reward fundamentally different organisational capabilities. This is the editorial

A contractor seven months into a £35 million NEC4 contract is financing £4.2 million of working capital. The work is on programme. The technical performance is sound. The cashflow position is not. Three teams diagnose three different causes and none of them identifies what is actually happening.

UK adjudication data records 2,264 referrals between May 2023 and April 2024, with inadequate contract administration identified as the leading cause of disputes at 50 per cent of cases. Behind that figure sits a pattern most experienced commercial directors recognise. Contractors with weak NEC4 programme compliance lose disproportionately on change assessment, on delay narratives, on cashflow timing, and on tender evaluation. The losses are not random.

The dangerous moment for a specialist contractor on an NEC project is not losing the bid. It is winning it. Losing a bid costs nothing but the bid effort. Winning a bid the contractor cannot then administer properly costs the margin the work was supposed to deliver. The specialist mobilises, the team gets on with the work they are good at, the project completes, and the expected profit is not there. The reasons are spread across the project life in small increments nobody fla