Subcontractor charging for plant/ labour without increase to Defined Cost

NEC3 and NEC4 Contracts Compensation Events
1

Apologies if this has been answered previously I have struggled to find it.

Contract is an NEC4 ECCS option A.

A Subcontractor delivered plant to site on Monday and used it that day to carry out scoped works. The plant was intended to be used again on Friday, with no works planned in between. However, an instruction was later issued to carry out additional CE works on Thursday.

The plant is paid for on a per-day basis, and the Subcontractor had no intention of off-hiring it during the week. Whether or not the Thursday instruction had been issued, there is no change to the subcontractor’s Defined Cost.

Given this, is the Subcontractor entitled to charge for the plant on Thursday? Otherwise, it appears the Contractor would be getting the benefit of using the plant on Thursday without paying for it. If this is the case, is a Subcontractor allowed to claim there were planned works for the plant that day—not necessarily scoped works but potentially other duties such as tidying the compound or site—in order to justify the charge?

Does this also apply to labour costs if they were always planned to be on site for the full week?

2

On the question of whether you could claim the Equipment (correct NEC terminology) would have been working on something on the Thursday, you can do that provided it’s the truth. Is it?

In ECCS A the value of a compensation event is the change to Defined Cost. If the Subcontractor were to have an item of Equipment available in the Working Areas and paid for, but idle, then the change to Defined Cost for the Equipment is zero.

You might like to consider things like whether the Equipment would have been using any fuel or had a driver available on those idle days.

Same logic applies to labour, but for that to be true you’d have to have labour on site sat around doing nothing. That does happen for Equipment sometimes, but for people? Seems unlikely.