Pace, Price and Permission: Handling Acceleration Requests Without Absorbing the Risk

The Friday Afternoon Call

A client rings on a Friday afternoon. The programme has slipped, a tenant has a launch date, or a funder has lost patience. The request is familiar: can the team find three weeks? The instinct on site is to say yes and sort out the paperwork later. The commercial instinct should be more measured.

Acceleration is not a favour. It is a change to the basis on which the work was priced, programmed and resourced. Handled well, it protects the relationship and the margin. Handled badly, it converts a client's urgency into a contractor's unrecovered cost.

Two Requests Wearing the Same Coat

Not every request to work faster is an acceleration instruction. UK commercial teams should separate two ideas at the outset.

Mitigation is what a contractor does to reduce the effect of a delay event. It may involve resequencing, adding resource or working additional hours. Whether it is paid depends on the contract and on who carries the risk of the event. Under many forms, mitigation is part of the contractor's ordinary obligations, and the cost sits where the risk sits.

Acceleration is a deliberate attempt to shorten the works or bring a completion date forward beyond what the baseline programme required. Under NEC4, acceleration has a specific mechanism: the project manager may instruct it, and the parties agree the change to the Prices and the Completion Date. Under JCT and bespoke forms, acceleration is more often treated as a variation or a separate instruction, depending on the wording. The first question is therefore not 'how fast can we go?' but 'what does the contract allow, and who instructs it?'

Step One: Record the Ask

Verbal pressure is the enemy of a clean commercial position. The request should be captured in writing, promptly and without theatre. A short email is enough: confirm who asked, when, what outcome is sought, and by what date. Note that the request is being reviewed and that no change to the programme or price will take effect until it is instructed.

This is not hostility. It is the same discipline that applies to any instruction. A record made on the day is evidence; a recollection reconstructed three months later is an argument.

The record should also distinguish between a request for information and a request for action. A client asking 'could you do it?' is not the same as a client instructing 'please do it'. The gap between those two questions is where unpriced acceleration usually begins.

Step Two: Test the Programme Before You Test the Labour

Acceleration is often proposed before anyone has checked whether the programme can actually be compressed. Three tests should come first.

Is the critical path where the client thinks it is? Adding resource to a non-critical activity adds cost without shortening the project. A short review of the programme logic is cheaper than a fortnight of overtime that changes nothing.

Is there unresolved delay already in the system? Late design information, outstanding compensation events, access restrictions or unapproved samples may be driving the dates. Accelerating around those issues can mask the true cause and weaken the position later.

Is the proposed acceleration technically credible? Some sequences cannot be compressed without changing methodology, adding temporary works or accepting a different risk profile. A programme that assumes a second shift must also assume the supervision, welfare and testing that a second shift requires.

If the answer to these tests is that acceleration will not achieve the date, say so early. A candid programme review is more useful than a priced promise that cannot be kept.

Step Three: Price the Resource, Then Price the Risk

The resource cost is the visible part: additional labour, overtime, a second shift, extra plant, expedited materials, additional supervision, temporary works, extended welfare and more testing. These are estimable, though rarely at the same unit rates as the original work. Productivity falls when shifts are added, interfaces multiply and the same supervision is stretched.

The risk cost is the part that gets missed. Acceleration can disrupt sequenced trades, increase the likelihood of defects, create safety exposure through fatigue, and generate claims from subcontractors whose programmes are compressed without agreement. It can also fix a liability question in the client's favour if the contractor accelerates without recording why.

A priced acceleration proposal should therefore include a risk allowance and a clear statement of assumptions. It should say what is included, what is excluded, and what happens if the client's own decisions or information are later than the accelerated programme requires.

Step Four: Confirm the Change Before the Pace Changes

No acceleration should begin on a handshake. The contract mechanism should be used: an acceleration instruction under NEC4, a variation instruction under JCT, or whatever the bespoke form provides. The instruction should identify the scope of acceleration, the price, the revised dates and the basis on which the parties will proceed.

Where the client will not instruct but continues to pressure, the commercial team should record the pressure and state the consequences plainly. Proceeding at risk is a decision, not a default. If it is taken, it should be taken knowingly and minuted.

The Informal Squeeze

Most acceleration does not arrive as a formal instruction. It arrives in a site meeting, a corridor conversation or a message to a project manager: 'we need you to push'. Those words create factual acceleration long before they create contractual entitlement.

Teams should be briefed to route such requests to the commercial function. A standard response helps: the request is noted, it is being reviewed, and work will proceed on an accelerated basis only when instructed. That response is not obstruction. It is the difference between a managed change and an absorbed cost.

Speed Has a Price and a Permission

Clients rarely set out to transfer risk unfairly. They are responding to pressure of their own. The contractor's job is to make the choice visible: this is what acceleration costs, this is what it buys, and this is the instruction required to proceed.

A priced, instructed change is not a slower way to say yes. It is the only way to say yes without later having to explain why the work was done and the cost was not.