The supplier delivered late and the job stood still. Who pays?

Split the question in two, because the answers come from two different contracts:

Upwards, to the client: this one is yours

Your supplier is your choice and your risk. The qualifying delay lists in standard contracts cover the client’s side and named neutral events; an ordinary supplier failing you is on your side of every fence, so there is no extension of time for it, the completion date stands, and if the job runs past it, the damages exposure is live. Check the honest exceptions before conceding, because they exist: a supplier the client instructed you to use changes the analysis, materials covered by a client-choice allowance where the client’s late decision caused the late order is really client delay wearing a delivery costume, and genuine force majeure events have their own contractual homes. But the everyday case, the merchant just failed, is priced into your lump sum whether or not you knew you were pricing it.

Downwards, to the supplier: read the order terms first

Your recovery from the supplier depends on the contract of sale, and here is the industry’s quiet joke: merchant standard terms are drafted by merchants. Expect to find delivery dates stated as estimates only, liability for delay excluded, and consequential loss, your standing scaffold, your idle labour, your damages exposure, excluded hardest of all. Those exclusions are not always the end (against consumer buyers they face fairness tests; between businesses, unreasonable exclusions can be challenged, and a specifically promised date is stronger than a printed estimate), but between businesses they mostly hold, which yields the practical rule: your recovery downwards is usually much smaller than your loss upwards, and the gap is the risk you carry. Claim what the terms genuinely allow, in writing, itemised, promptly; and know that the strongest lever with a merchant you use weekly is often the account relationship, not the small claims track.

Prevention, four habits

• Order against the programme, not the memory: the one-page programme names the order-by week for every long-lead package.
• Get the date in writing as a date, not an estimate, on the acknowledgement, and for the critical packages ask what the supplier’s own lead time risk is: the answer tells you how much float to hold.
• Chase at fixed intervals before delivery, two weeks and one week out, in writing, because problems admitted early are resequencing problems and problems admitted on the day are standing-scaffold problems.
• Hold float on the critical deliveries and sequence so something else can proceed: the programme that dies when one lorry is late was a bet, not a plan.

The client conversation, handled straight

Tell the client early and factually, with the resequenced plan attached: what is late, what you are doing, what still finishes when. Resist the tempting sentence “it is the supplier’s fault, nothing we can do”, because contractually it is your fault upwards, and training the client to expect otherwise sets up the damages argument badly. On a homeowner job the analysis is identical (delivery risk owes nothing to the Construction Act, and section 106 changes nothing here): what helps is a quote whose programme language distinguished estimates from promises before anything was late.

What to do this week

1. List the long-lead packages on the live job with their order-by dates against the programme, and order anything overdue today.

2. Read your main merchant’s terms once, the delivery and liability clauses, so the downstream answer never surprises you again.

3. Set the chase rhythm for everything critical currently on order.

Where the information stops

Whether a particular exclusion clause would survive challenge, and whether a specifically promised date overrides printed terms, are wording-and-facts questions; on a delivery failure big enough to threaten the job’s account, the order paperwork deserves a professional read before you either absorb the loss or start the claim.