Omitting work: what you cannot take away
An omission looks like the safest instruction there is. It reduces the account, nobody has to price anything new, and the contractor cannot really object. Sometimes it can.
QScope Team · 30 April 2026 · 5 min read
The power to vary the works includes the power to omit them. It is used constantly and usually without controversy: the client cuts the specification, drops a phase, or decides not to build the canopy after all.
What the power does not extend to is omitting work from this contractor in order to have the same work carried out by somebody else.
Why that limit exists
The contractor has bargained for the right to carry out the works and to earn the profit on them. A power to omit is a power to reduce the scope of the project, not a power to reassign the contractor’s work to a cheaper competitor while keeping the contract alive.
Where work is omitted and then given to others, the usual analysis is breach of contract, and the measure of damages is the profit and contribution the contractor would have earned. The instruction may be valid as an instruction and still sound in damages.
The grey area
It is not always obvious which is which. If the employer omits a fit-out package because the tenant will now do it under a separate agreement, is that a reduction in scope or a reassignment? The answer usually turns on whether the work is still being done as part of the same project, on the same site, in the same period.
Where the position is genuinely unclear, agreeing it commercially before the instruction goes out is far cheaper than establishing it afterwards.
Valuing an omission
Omissions are valued at the rates in the bill, in the same way as additions. Two things routinely go wrong.
The first is omitting at the bill rate where the rate included a share of fixed cost that has already been incurred. Mobilisation, design, setting out and procurement do not come back because the work is cancelled late.
The second is the knock-on effect on the remaining work. Omitting half a floor area does not halve the preliminaries, and it may make the remaining rates unreasonable in the same way an approximate quantity movement does.
Late omissions
Where materials have been ordered or fabricated, the cost is committed. An omission at that point is still available, but the valuation has to deal with the committed cost, any cancellation charge, and the contractor’s reasonable steps to mitigate.
The contractor should be able to evidence the commitment. The employer should not be paying for an order that could have been cancelled free of charge a week earlier.
Keep the line visible
Deleting an omitted item from the bill removes the audit trail. Two years on, nobody can tell whether the item was omitted, never priced, or lost. Strike it through, keep the value, and record the instruction that omitted it.
QScope keeps omitted lines visible with their value struck through rather than deleting them, so the omission is still traceable at the final account.