The designer approved it. You still can't build it.

There is a sentence that gets said on site every week, in good faith, by people who know what they are doing. "The designer's approved it, so we're fine to proceed."

They are not fine to proceed. And the gap between those two positions is where a surprising amount of money quietly leaks out of a project.

Approval is not instruction

Under NEC4, the authority to change the Works Information sits with a specific, named party, usually the Project Manager. A designer's approval of a drawing, a technical submission, or a proposed method is a statement about technical acceptability. It is not, and cannot be, an instruction to change what you are contractually obliged to build.

This matters because the two things travel together so often that they start to feel like one thing:

• A revised drawing lands, stamped and approved by the design team.
• The revision changes something real: a reinforcement detail, a duct route, a level.
• The site team, reasonably, builds to the latest approved drawing.

Every step there is sensible. And yet if that change needed a formal instruction and never got one, the contractor has now built a change with no clear entitlement to be paid for it.

A designer's nod tells you the change is safe to build. It tells you nothing about who is paying for it.

Where it shows up

On live civils packages, this pattern is most dangerous around three things: reinforcement changes, service diversions, and anything involving levels or setting-out. These are exactly the areas where design iterates most, where revisions come thick and fast, and where the commercial consequence of a change is largest.

The failure is rarely dramatic. Nobody makes an obviously wrong call. It is an accumulation of small, reasonable decisions to "just build to the latest drawing", until, months later, someone assembling the final account tries to reconstruct which revisions carried an instruction and which did not.

What good looks like

The discipline is unglamorous and it works: every revision that changes the Works Information gets tested for whether it needs an instruction, before it gets built. Not after. Not at final account.

That is a reading problem before it is a contractual one. Somebody has to notice the change, understand its contractual character, and raise the flag while there is still time to act. On a busy project, that somebody is drowning.

This is the specific gap Resection was built to close, but the principle stands whether or not you ever use a tool for it. Approval is not instruction. Build to the drawing, but never mistake a stamp for an authority to proceed.