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,

The UK construction sector has committed to delivering £718 billion of work over the next decade against a labour market that the Construction Industry Training Board projects will need an additional 239,300 workers between 2025 and 2029 just to meet the requirement. Senior NEC planning capability sits inside that shortage. The conventional view of remote planning support positions it as a cost-saving arrangement or a small-contractor accommodation. Both framings understate w

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