Variations
He told me to do it on site. Can I get paid for it?
Yes, if you can show it was ordered. The order was real, the work was real, and six months later the only thing that exists is your memory of a conversation by the scaffold. One email, sent the same day, changes everything about how that ends.
QScope Team·2 February 2026·4 min read
Tuesday, on site: “while you are at it, take that wall back another course and move the socket.” You did it, because that is how jobs run. Nothing was written anywhere.
The work happened, so the question is not whether it deserves payment. It is whether you can show it was ordered when someone later says it was included, or never asked for.
Why the paper matters more than the argument
The standard forms require instructions to be given in writing, or confirmed in writing within a set time; a purely verbal one may not count as an instruction at all until confirmed. On a contract that says nothing, the writing is not a formality but your evidence: months later, the person who said it may genuinely remember it differently.
The one-line email, same day
The whole technique is this, and it costs a minute in the van:
“Confirming your instruction on site today: take the rear wall back one course and relocate the socket on the east elevation. We expect a cost and time effect and will price it in the next valuation. Proceeding unless you tell us otherwise by Friday.”
Four things are doing work there: what was ordered, when, that it has a cost effect, and a date to object by. Silence after that email is very hard to argue with. This is practice, not statute, and it is the cheapest habit in this whole series.
Who has to have said it
An instruction counts when it comes from someone your contract empowers to give one: the architect or contract administrator, or the client on a job without one. The client’s spouse, the neighbour and the tiler do not bind anybody. If the wrong person is doing the instructing, that is its own problem with its own page.
On a domestic job, exactly the same
Nothing above depends on the Construction Act, so it works unchanged on an extension for the family living in the house. If anything it matters more there, because the contract is thinner and your records are a bigger share of everything you have.
What to do this week
1. Send confirmations today for anything ordered this week that has no paper. Same shape as above, honest date: “confirming your instruction of Tuesday”.
2. Make it a same-day habit, from the van, before the yard. The value of the record decays with every day between the words and the writing.
3. Then price it properly, through the valuation ladder, and into the next valuation rather than a heap at the end.