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Compensation events are drifting on my NEC job

Events are happening faster than the notifications, and nobody has checked our subcontract's NEC terms against each one.

Updated: . By Jack Butler-Kettle, Construction Claims Consultant.

To stop the backlog building again, see what to do when you are not tracking your NEC notification deadlines.

What's happening?

On an NEC job, events can pile up faster than the notifications and quotations. Your subcontract's form, options, amendments and Scope decide which events count, who must notify them, what starts each clock and what replies follow. A clause number or timetable from another job is not a safe guide.

Drift leaves events unrecorded, quotations unfinished, and replies that are hard to match to the work actually done. That gap in the evidence can cut a later assessment. What a late or missing notification costs you depends on the actual wording, its exceptions and your records.

The solution

Triage first. Read your signed subcontract and its amendments, and list every event with its awareness evidence, notification, quotation and reply. Deal with anything whose period closes this week before anything else. Compensation Event Claim runs that triage and puts the events still in time into a quotation sequence built from the records.

Events that may be out of time are listed with their dates and the amendment wording for advice, neither written off nor rescued on paper. Compensation Event Loss Prevention then keeps notification, quotation and implementation as separate lines on a live log. Implementation is the point an event is settled. Kept that way, the backlog does not build again.

Example

Illustrative example. The scenario and figures are invented.

The facts

A subcontractor on an NEC subcontract is 5 months in, with 23 events it sees as compensation events. Eleven have been notified, six have quotations and two have been assessed.

What happens

  1. Before any tracker is filled in, the signed subcontract is read with its option and amendment schedule.
  2. The amendments cut the notification period to 4 weeks from awareness. They make the main contractor's project manager, through the specified communication system, the only valid recipient.
  3. Each event is mapped against that clock: the awareness evidence, the notification and its date of service, the quotation and its period, and where the replies stand. Those are kept as three separate records.
  4. Triage comes first: three events run out of time within the week, and are notified before anything else.
  5. Five events seem to be past their period. They are listed with their awareness evidence for assessment, not written off or rescued on paper.
  6. The rest go into a quotation sequence. Eight quotations totalling £140,000 go in over the next 3 weeks, with the records behind them.

The outcome

The five possibly late events, £36,000 between them, go to the subcontractor's solicitor with the amendment's wording and one question: what does lateness mean under it?