NEC4 Early Warnings: Not an Admission, a Shield

Site teams treat early warnings the way people treat dentists: something to avoid until it hurts. The instinct is understandable and completely wrong. Under NEC4 clause 15 the early warning is one of the few contractual devices that costs nothing to use and actively protects the party who uses it, and the contract punishes the party who stays quiet.

What clause 15 actually requires

The Contractor and the Project Manager each notify the other as soon as either becomes aware of any matter which could increase the total of the Prices, delay Completion, delay meeting a Key Date or impair the performance of the works in use. The Contractor may also notify matters that could increase its own total cost. Could is the operative word. The threshold is possibility, not certainty, and the notice is a sentence or two of description, not a claim.

Either party may then instruct attendance at an early warning meeting, where the people who can actually do something about the matter decide how to avoid or reduce its effect. The Project Manager records it all in the Early Warning Register, which quietly becomes one of the most useful documents on the project: a dated, agreed history of every risk and who proposed what.

The cost of silence

Here is the part that should end the reluctance. If a compensation event arises from a matter the Contractor should have given early warning of, the event is assessed as if the warning had been given. In plain terms, the extra cost and delay that a timely warning would have avoided comes off the Contractor's recovery. Silence has a price and the contract prints it.

The reverse also matters. A well kept trail of early warnings makes later compensation events almost self-proving: the matter was raised in June, the meeting happened in July, the mitigation was agreed, the event still landed, and here is the register showing all of it. Adjudicators love a party that behaved like the contract asked.

Doing it well in practice

Make early warnings routine and low ceremony. A standing agenda item at the weekly meeting, a simple template, and a rule that anyone on the team can raise one. Notify supply chain risks, design gaps, access concerns and interface problems as they appear, not once they bite. Keep the language factual and free of blame; the notice describes a matter, it does not prosecute anyone.

And never confuse the shield with the sword. The early warning protects the relationship and the assessment; it does not preserve entitlement. When a matter becomes an event, the clause 61.3 notification still has to go in within eight weeks. Teams that run both notices as a pair, warning early and notifying promptly, spend their energy on the works instead of on disputes, which is the whole point of the NEC. Our NEC contract administration service sets these routines up for teams that want it done properly from the start.

Common questions

Is giving an early warning an admission that the problem is my fault?

No. Clause 15.1 requires each party to notify matters that could affect price, time or performance regardless of whose risk they are. An early warning allocates nothing; it triggers a conversation. Staying silent, by contrast, has a defined cost: compensation events can be assessed as if you had given the warning, stripping out the cost that early action would have avoided.

Does an early warning notify a compensation event?

No, and this misunderstanding loses real money. Early warnings and compensation event notifications are separate notices under separate clauses doing separate jobs. A matter raised under clause 15 still needs a clause 61.3 notification, within eight weeks of awareness, to preserve entitlement.

Who keeps the Early Warning Register?

Under NEC4 the Project Manager prepares and maintains the register, records the matters notified and the decisions taken at early warning meetings, and issues the revised register after each meeting. In practice smart contractors keep their own copy too, because the register is powerful evidence of who knew what and when.