Supply chain volatility: is your contract fit for purpose?

Supply chain disruption is rising across Herefordshire, Shropshire and the Wye Valley. If your contracts aren’t up to scratch, your business could be exposed when delays and costs escalate.

Across the UK, businesses are reporting renewed disruption and sharp cost pressure in key inputs such as energy, logistics and manufactured components. Whether you’re buying, selling, building or moving goods, disruption quickly becomes a contract issue: late deliveries, re‑pricing requests, ‘can’t supply’ notices and customers demanding certainty you can’t always give.

For businesses in border regions like Herefordshire and the Welsh Marches, this is particularly acute. Many operate in agriculture and food production, construction and logistics, where supply chains are interdependent and time-sensitive.

The practical issue is rarely a single event; it’s the cumulative impact of delays, shortages and cost swings across multiple suppliers and routes.

If you’re seeing, or expect to see, delivery slippage, supplier re-pricing or pressure to accept revised terms, a targeted contract review can pay for itself. The aim isn’t to make contracts longer, but to ensure risk allocation and ‘what happens next’ are clear when disruption hits.

Contract health-check

A structured contract health-check can help you identify where risk sits, prioritise renegotiation of high-value or high-risk agreements, tighten drafting for upcoming renewals and put internal processes in place so contractual rights are protected when disruption lands.

In our experience, a few clauses and processes have the greatest commercial impact:

• Price variation and indexation: can you adjust pricing if input costs rise materially and what evidence is needed?
• Delivery, lead times and service levels: are dates ‘time of the essence’ and do your remedies reflect commercial reality?
• Force majeure and relief events: does the clause work in practice, including notice and mitigation requirements? Under English law, you only get what is written
• Allocation of risk in the chain: are your customer obligations aligned with what your suppliers owe you?
• Termination and exit: if performance becomes unsustainable, can you pause, terminate or re‑scope without triggering disproportionate liability?
• Liability caps and exclusions: do they reflect your real exposure, including delay and consequential losses?
• Operational notice mechanics: do your teams know how and when to serve notices so you don’t accidentally lose rights?

The earlier you sense‑check your templates and key trading contracts, the more options you keep open.