New Practice Note - International Use of the NEC4 Facilities Management Contract

NEC, the leading provider of collaborative contracts, has been working alongside the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management (IWFM) and other partners to produce a series of guidance documents relating to how the recent NEC4 Facilities Management Contracts (FMC) can be used to implement and support best practice for social value and the living wage in the facilities management (FM) sector.

NEC is pleased to announce the next guidance note in this series, discussing how best to use the NEC FMC internationally and in cross-border contexts.

The FM sector is very large and very varied, and the contracts adopted therefore range from small, workstream specific contracts for single site, individual clients (such as a cleaning contract) to total FM, international ones. The FMC, like all NEC contracts, is written to be independent of any specific legal system, and therefore can be considered for use not only in the United Kingdom but in any country, and across national boundaries.

Published in July, this latest guidance gives an outline of how the FMC can be used internationally, demonstrating that the benefits of a standard contract form can be seen in even the most complex of cross border scenarios. It details the way that various aspects of the standard contract work in the more common single country contract, such as would be used for a FM contract in the United Kingdom. It then highlights the issues that need to be addressed for international contracts, and how the FMC and its Scope would be constructed to accommodate these issues.