Building the way to levelling up - Beckie Hart

While businesses, experts and heads of state continue to ponder the climate event’s significance, we must all hope thoughts now turn to delivery. Because without the ability to turn ambitions into action, promises will remain just that.

This is the focus of a new report from the CBI and Yorkshire-based professional services consultancy Turner & Townsend. Programmes with Purpose: delivering success in Government’s major projects sets out a series of recommendations to improve the delivery of the Government’s Major Projects Portfolio (GMPP) across a range of critical sectors including transport, utilities and defence. 

Whether on wind, nuclear or technologies yet to be unveiled, getting this right will be critical for our region’s success in decarbonisation and, as we all know, if Yorkshire & the Humber doesn’t decarbonise, the country doesn’t either.

Post Budget, this matters for the public finances too. Taxpayers’ money must always be spent wisely. Expenditure across the GMPP stood at £524bn according to the latest figures.

Presently, however, nearly three quarters of major projects are currently falling behind expectations to deliver their objectives on time and on budget. Improvements are urgently needed.

Together with Turner & Townsend, the research has been developed with insight from industry, and has received the backing of the Major Projects Association and the Infrastructure Client Group.

The landscape is awash with good ideas, strong policies, and clear examples of what best practice looks like. The challenge now is sharing and embedding good practices across everyday operations in both the public and private sectors. Recommendations include a strengthened role for the Infrastructure & Projects Authority, (IPA) which is the body charged with keeping track of the UK’s biggest projects

Creating specialist project teams within a beefed-up IPA will enable it to directly inject greater expertise into major projects, supporting both clients and suppliers to finish projects on time and on budget.

As with most things in business, little happens without excellent leadership. Unfortunately, it’s widely acknowledged that churn of major project leaders in both the public and private sectors has dogged delivery for years, so we need to find a way to reduce the loss of institutional knowledge.

For that reason, we recommend incentivising longer tenures for senior civil servants and business leaders alike.

Getting this right will mean help for our economy both at home and overseas, as there’s much more we can do to harness the export potential of innovation and expertise working through the Department for International Trade.

And post-COP26, the need for action on carbon emissions in major projects could not be clearer.

The bottom line is that if levelling up and net zero are to become a reality, successfully delivering major projects right across the country must become the norm rather than the exception.

Only then we will begin to see the dividends, whether that’s new jobs created, nuclear power stations built, or new rail lines completed. And given the urgency of delivering transformational projects across the length and breadth of the country, there isn’t a moment to lose.

Beckie Hart is CBI regional director for Yorkshire

---

Support The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today.

Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you'll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app and receive exclusive members-only offers.

So, please - if you can - pay for our work. Just £5 per month is the starting point. If you think that which we are trying to achieve is worth more, you can pay us what you think we are worth. By doing so, you will be investing in something that is becoming increasingly rare. Independent journalism that cares less about right and left and more about right and wrong. Journalism you can trust.

Thank you

James Mitchinson