The NEC3 Engineering and Construction Contract (ECC) has often
been hailed as the 'construction contract of the future'.
In terms of UK public sector projects, this has rung true; NEC3 is
the Office of Government Commerce's contract of choice on
construction projects and has been used on many projects such as
Heathrow Terminal 5 and the 2012 Olympic Games. In other parts of
the world, including Asia, the local or in-house standard form
contracts are still very much in use on domestic projects, and
FIDIC (or hybrids thereof) dominate the international projects
scene. However, in some Asian countries at least, this may be set
to change. For example, the Hong Kong government recently completed
a pilot run using the ECC on a road drainage project, and is
considering NEC3 for many other projects in the pipeline.
