Can I avoid a letter of intent when a package must start early?

The pressure to issue a letter of intent comes from the same place every time: the works are needed on site before the full subcontract is finished, and something is wanted in writing to let the subcontractor start. The trouble is that a letter of intent is, by design, an incomplete arrangement, and the questions it leaves open, the full scope, the payment machinery, what happens if the parties never agree the rest, are exactly the questions a dispute later turns on. At procurement stage, before anything has gone wrong, you usually have a better option: compress the subcontract rather than replace it. Agree the price and essential terms, draft a short but complete order that captures the scope, payment provisions and key dates, and get it signed before the works start. It takes a little longer, but produces an actual contract rather than a placeholder everyone intends to firm up and never does. If time will not allow even that, keep any interim document narrow and cash-capped, define precisely what it authorises and for how long, and treat it as a countdown to a proper order, because the danger is always that it quietly becomes the contract by default when the full order never materialises. The safest habit is to design the programme so a signed subcontract, not an intent letter, lets the works begin.

Take a main contractor who needs a piling subcontractor to mobilise in ten days and reaches for a letter of intent because the full subcontract will not be ready in time. Instead, on advice, they compress: the price is already agreed from the tender, so a short subcontract on the matching form is drafted capturing the scope, payment terms and completion date, the two soft points are closed by email, and it is signed on day nine. The piling starts on day ten on a complete contract. The parallel job, where a letter of intent was used, runs the piling and then the whole substructure under successive extensions of the same letter, the full order never gets written, and when a variation is disputed six months later there is no agreed contract to resolve it from. The compressed subcontract took a couple of extra days and removed the risk the letter would have carried for the life of the package.