The NEC4 Accepted Programme: the document that quietly decides your claims

On FIDIC jobs the programme is important. On NEC jobs it is the operating system of the contract. Teams that treat the clause 31 submission as a planner's chore — something to tidy up once the real work settles down — discover the cost months later, when a compensation event lands and the baseline it should have been measured against does not exist. Here is how the Accepted Programme mechanism actually works, clock by clock, and where entitlement leaks away.

What must the programme show? Clause 31.2

Clause 31.2 sets out a long, specific list of what every programme submitted for acceptance must contain: the starting date, access dates, Key Dates and Completion Date; planned Completion; the order and timing of operations; provisions for float and time risk allowances; health and safety requirements; and the dates when the Contractor needs access, information, plant and materials or other things from the Client. Guidance from GMH Planning on clause 31.2 is blunt about the consequence: a programme missing this information gives the Project Manager contractual grounds to withhold acceptance (GMH Planning).

Two of those items deserve a commercial manager's attention, not just a planner's:

• Time risk allowances are the durations the Contractor has added for risks it owns — weather, ground, supply. They must be visible in the programme, and NEC guidance is clear they belong to the Contractor: they are not available to be consumed by compensation events (NEC).
• Float must also be shown — and who benefits from it depends on which float it is. We cover that fight in who owns the float.

The acceptance clock: two weeks, four reasons, and NEC4's deemed acceptance

Under clause 31.3, the Project Manager has two weeks from submission to respond — either accepting the programme or giving reasons for not accepting it. The contract allows only four reasons: the Contractor's plans are not practicable, the programme does not show the information the contract requires, it does not represent the Contractor's plans realistically, or it does not comply with the Scope (GMH Planning).

NEC4 added a remedy NEC3 never had. As Fenwick Elliott explain in their practical guide to NEC accepted programmes, if the Project Manager does not respond within the two weeks, the Contractor may notify the failure — and if the Project Manager then fails to respond within a further one week, the programme is treated as accepted (Fenwick Elliott).

Note what that mechanism requires. Deemed acceptance is not automatic. Silence at the two-week mark changes nothing by itself: the Contractor must serve the notification of failure to start the one-week deemed-acceptance period. A contractor that submits a programme and waits politely — for a month, for a quarter — has protected nothing. This is the same pattern as NEC's compensation-event reply clocks: the remedy exists, but only for the party that runs the clock.

The 25% retention: clause 50.5

If no programme is identified in the Contract Data, clause 50.5 provides that one quarter of the Price for Work Done to Date is retained in assessments of the amount due until the Contractor has submitted a first programme showing the information the contract requires (NEC). On a project turning over millions a month, that is not an administrative nudge — it is a material hit to cashflow, imposed for nothing more than not submitting a compliant programme.

Why it decides your compensation events: clauses 63.5 and 64.2

Here is where the Accepted Programme stops being a planning document and becomes the claim itself.

Under clause 63.5, a delay to the Completion Date is assessed as the length of time that, due to the compensation event, planned Completion is later than planned Completion as shown on the Accepted Programme current at the dividing date (GMH Planning / CECA bulletin). The dividing date, set by clause 63.1, is the date of the instruction or certificate for events the Project Manager or Supervisor triggers, and the date of notification for everything else. The baseline for your extension of time is therefore whatever the last Accepted Programme showed at that moment — not what the site actually looked like, and not the draft revision sitting unaccepted in someone's inbox.

The consequences follow mechanically:

1. A stale Accepted Programme means a distorted assessment. If the last accepted revision is four months old, every compensation event in between is measured against a picture of the works that no longer exists.
2. No Accepted Programme means the other side builds the baseline. Under clause 64.2, if there is no Accepted Programme, or the Contractor has not submitted a programme or revisions as required, the Project Manager assesses the programme for the remaining work themselves and uses it to assess the compensation event (NEC). The contractor who neglected its programme has handed its counterparty the ruler by which its own claim is measured.
3. Revisions are contractual obligations, not good practice. Clause 32 requires revised programmes at the interval stated in the Contract Data, when instructed, and when the Contractor chooses. Each missed interval is another period in which events are assessed against an ageing baseline — or under clause 64.2.

The courts have shown little sympathy for teams that let the record drift. In Northern Ireland Housing Executive v Healthy Buildings (Ireland) Ltd [2017] NIQB 43 — an NEC3 case on compensation-event assessment — the court held that where a compensation event is assessed late, actual information available at the time of assessment is used rather than the forecast that should have been made earlier. Deeny J put it plainly: "why should I shut my eyes and grope in the dark when the material is available to show what work [the consultant] actually did and how much it cost them" (Bevan Brittan). The lesson generalises: NEC's machinery rewards the party whose contemporaneous record — programme included — is current and accepted, and punishes the party relying on reconstruction.

Where Accepted Programmes actually fail on projects

Across NEC projects the same failure modes repeat, and almost none of them are planning-competence failures:

• The first programme goes in late because the team is mobilising — and the 25% retention bites, or the Project Manager's own programme becomes the baseline for the early compensation events.
• A rejection is never cured. The programme is rejected for a missing clause 31.2 item, the planner intends to resubmit, and the correction slips down the priority list. Months pass with no Accepted Programme at all.
• Nobody runs the deemed-acceptance clock. Submissions sit unanswered for weeks; no notification of failure is ever served; the contractor assumes silence is progress.
• Revision intervals drift. The Contract Data says every four weeks; reality becomes every ten. Each compensation event in the gap is assessed against the old picture.
• The programme and the contract are watched by different people. The planner owns the P6 file, the commercial team owns the notices, and no one owns the connection between "the accepted baseline is out of date" and "our next compensation event will be measured against it."

Every one of these is an information failure: the knowledge existed on the project, but the clock it mattered to was not being watched by the person who could act. It is the same chain we trace in how a programme slip becomes a contractual notice — and the same reason NEC's early warning machinery exists at all.

Where a governed AI layer helps

A contract-aware system that has read your particular NEC4 conditions — amendments included — and ingested your programme knows which clocks are live: the two-week acceptance response, the notification that starts deemed acceptance, the clause 32 revision interval in your Contract Data, and the fact that a compensation event has just been notified while the last Accepted Programme is three revisions old. It can flag each of these to the right person before the clock lapses, and draft the communication for a human to review and send. It does not decide, and it does not send anything itself — every flag carries its citation back to the clause. The machine's job is narrower and duller: make sure the document your claims are measured against never quietly goes stale.

This article is general information, not legal advice. The sources below are provided so you can verify every clause and case for yourself; on a live dispute, take advice from a qualified construction lawyer.

Sources & further reading

• Fenwick Elliott, NEC Accepted Programmes: A Practical Guide — https://www.fenwickelliott.com/knowledge-hub/insight/issue-94/
• GMH Planning, ECC Clause 31.2 — Programme Requirements — https://gmhplanning.co.uk/nec-guidance-notes/ecc-clause-31-2-programme-requirements/
• GMH Planning, ECC Clause 31.3 — Programme Acceptance — https://gmhplanning.co.uk/nec-guidance-notes/ecc-clause-31-3-programme-acceptance/
• GMH Planning / CECA, Clause 63.5 and assessing a compensation event against the last Accepted Programme — https://gmhplanning.co.uk/nec-downloads/clause-63-5-and-assessing-a-compensation-event-against-the-last-accepted-programme/
• NEC, Retaining monies when programme not accepted (clause 50.5 FAQ) — https://www.neccontract.com/support/faqs/retaining-monies-when-programme-not-accepted
• NEC, When and why NEC project managers have to assess compensation events (clause 64) — https://www.neccontract.com/news/when-and-why-nec-project-managers-have-to-assess-compensation-events
• NEC, Why you need reasonable time risk allowances in NEC contracts — https://www.neccontract.com/news/why-you-need-reasonable-time-risk-allowances-in-nec-contracts
• Bevan Brittan, Actual v forecast costs: assessing the effect of retrospective compensation events under NEC3 (Healthy Buildings [2017] NIQB 43) — https://www.bevanbrittan.com/insights/articles/2017/actual-v-forecast-costs-assessing-the-effect-of-retrospective-compensation-events-under-nec3/
• HKA, Approach to Delay Analysis involving NEC Contracts — https://www.hka.com/article/approach-to-delay-analysis-involving-nec-contracts/