You promised to maintain that road.

You promised to maintain that road

A port job. The nearest quarry with acceptable armour stone is forty kilometres inland, and the only sensible route runs along a public road through two villages. For eight months, loaded lorries use it several hundred times a week.

By month nine the road has failed. Not dramatically — edge break-up, rutting in the wheel paths, a section where the surface has gone entirely. The roads authority writes to the contractor requiring reinstatement of the affected lengths before it will sign off anything else.

The site team's reaction is immediate and reasonable: we did not design this, we did not choose where the quarry is, and rebuilding a public road isn't in our scope. Somebody starts drafting a claim.

They're about to lose it, and the reason is in a clause nobody read at tender.

Three answers, and only one is right

When a cost appears that nobody planned for, there are exactly three things it can be, and they get tested in a particular order.

It can be a variation — somebody with authority instructed a change. Week 6 closed that list to three people, and a roads authority isn't on it. Nobody instructed anything here.

It can be a risk that materialised, in which case the question is whether a clause puts that uncertainty on the employer. Risk Week 4 is worth remembering: if you can predict it, it is not a risk, it is a cost. Several hundred loaded lorry movements a week for eight months, on a rural road, isn't an uncertain event.

Or — and this is the answer people skip — it can be something you already agreed to do, in a sentence you didn't notice you were signing.

What the access route clause actually says

Sub-clause 4.15 deals with access routes, and it does four things.

It treats you as having satisfied yourself, at the base date, about whether the access routes are suitable and available. It requires you to take the measures necessary to stop your own traffic damaging any road or bridge — and it specifically mentions using appropriate vehicles within legal load and width limits. It makes you responsible, as between the parties, for repairing damage caused by your use of the routes and for whatever maintenance that use requires. And it puts the signage, permissions and permits for your use of those routes on you.

Read together, those sentences answer the question completely. The road was not damaged by an unforeseeable event; it was damaged by your traffic doing exactly what everybody expected it to do. The obligation to put it right didn't arrive with the authority's letter. It arrived at signature.

Which makes it an estimate line, not a claim

This is the move that Week 4 set up and that this whole track has been building towards. The contract decides whether something is a risk at all.

If the conditions say the contractor maintains and repairs the access routes it uses, then haul road deterioration is not a risk to be scored on a register. It is a quantity: kilometres of road, months of use, an expected condition at handover, and a rate. It belongs in the estimate, in the preliminaries, and in the logistics plan — priced, not scored.

Put it on a risk register and two things go wrong. You have not priced a cost you are certain to incur, so your tender is low by that amount. And you have parked it in a document that produces contingency rather than method, so nobody plans the wearing course, the passing bays or the wash-down that would have made the damage smaller.

The most expensive mistakes on a project are rarely arguments you lost. They're obligations you never noticed you had taken on.

The same trick, in four other places

Access routes aren't special. They are simply the clearest example of a pattern that runs through the conditions, and once you have seen it you start finding it everywhere.

Existing services and structures on or near the site, and what condition they are expected to be in afterwards. Setting-out, and who carries the consequences of a reference point that turns out to be wrong. Site clearance at the end, which is usually priced as a fortnight of tidying and occasionally turns out to include reinstating everything you built temporary works on. Protection of adjacent property, which is unbounded until somebody bounds it.

None of these clauses has a dramatic heading. Most of them read like scene-setting. And every one of them contains a sentence beginning with the words the contractor shall, which is the tell.

An obligation written in that form doesn't announce itself as a cost. It just sits there, entirely reasonable, until the month somebody sends a letter asking you to perform it.

The exception that could still save you

There is one route out, and it turns on a date rather than on fairness.

If a route stops being usable or suitable because somebody else altered it — the employer, or a third party — and that alteration happened once the base date had passed, then any delay or cost falling on you is recoverable. Subject, as always, to the twenty-eight day notice from Week 1.

So the questions to ask are about changes, not about hardship. Did the authority impose a weight restriction after signature that forced longer routes? Did somebody close a bridge? Did the employer's other contractor take over part of the road? Any of those is a change to the route after the base date, and the position flips.

Notice what is doing the work: the base date again, exactly as it does in the definition of Unforeseeable that decided the rock in Risk Week 14. The contract keeps asking the same question — what did you know, or what should you have known, when you priced this?

Practical insight

Do this before the next tender goes out, not after the letter arrives.

List every route your traffic will use that you do not own. For each one, write down who is responsible for its condition under the contract, what state it is in now, and what state somebody will expect at the end. If you can't answer the third question you have an open-ended liability, and photographs taken before you start are the cheapest insurance in construction.

Then go through the conditions looking specifically for obligations dressed as background. Access routes, existing services, temporary works, clearing the site, protecting adjacent property. These clauses rarely have dramatic headings and they routinely contain the words “the Contractor shall”. Every one of them is either priced or it is a surprise.

And when something expensive appears mid-job, ask the three questions in order. Variation, risk, or already yours. The third takes ten minutes to check and saves the months that a badly founded claim will otherwise consume.

Key takeaways

✔ An unplanned cost is one of three things: an instructed variation, a risk the contract allocates elsewhere, or an obligation you already accepted.

✔ Sub-clause 4.15 treats you as having satisfied yourself about access routes at the base date.

✔ It also makes you responsible for preventing damage from your traffic, for repairing damage your use causes, and for the maintenance that use requires.

✔ Legal load and width limits are named specifically. Overloading isn't a commercial decision with a cost attached — it is a breach.

✔ Where the contract has already made something yours, it stops being a risk and becomes an estimate line. Scoring it on a register instead means you never priced it and never planned it.

✔ The exception is narrow: somebody other than you alters the route, and does it after the base date. Then time and cost are recoverable, subject to the usual notice.

✔ The base date does the same work here as it does in the definition of Unforeseeable: what should you have known when you priced this?

What's coming next

The quarry example had one variable this site has never handled: the haulage was priced in one currency and the diesel was bought in another. Track 2 spent twenty-four weeks on money and never once dealt with what happens when the money itself moves. Next week we close that gap — how contracts split payment between currencies, what the exchange rates in the Contract Data actually fix, why adjustment for changes in cost is a different mechanism from currency risk, and where a job can lose its margin without a single thing going wrong on site.