Notices keep going out late, or not at all

Most contracts pay the party that wrote first, not the party that suffered most. Notice clauses sit buried in conditions nobody reads twice: what must be notified, by whom, to whom, in what form, within what period. Some are conditions of being paid at all, and NEC's eight-week bar in clause 61.3 can extinguish an entitlement entirely. Meanwhile the site deals with each event the practical way, a phone call, an email chain, getting on with the job, and the window closes with nobody watching it.

The pattern is structural, not careless. The people who see the triggering events, on site, are not the people who know the notice periods, in the contract, and no meeting exists where the two sets of knowledge touch. So the delay gets managed but never notified, the change gets built but never confirmed, and months later a real entitlement fails on timing while everyone agrees the event happened.

What changes it is a map and a rhythm: every notice the contract asks for on one page, with its trigger and window, owned by a named person, and a monthly read of what happened on site against that map, so the event that needs a notice gets one while the notice can still be given.