£718 billion of ambition: Britain’s infrastructure challenge is now delivery
For the past 10 years, Britain has debated whether the level of investment in infrastructure is adequate. The question, according to Edward Shaw, development director at Empower Advisory, is: “Are we confident we can deliver on everything we have committed to build?”
Of course, the magnitude of the opportunity is enormous. The National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority’s updated Infrastructure Pipeline has identified, as of today, 734 planned projects which represent £718 billion of public and private capital investment over the next 10 years. Energy accounts for £365 billion of that total. Recently, analysis conducted by the UK Government suggests that delivering this pipeline will require an average infrastructure and construction workforce of between 629,000 and 706,000 people each year over the next half decade.
Water is providing another indication of the scale ahead. Ofwat’s current five-year settlement allows £104 billion of expenditure over the AMP8 period (between 2025 and 2030), including a substantial increase in new investment.
The issue is clear when you add major and complex programmes across transport, defence, energy networks, digital infrastructure, housing and the built environment.
Britain has not and will not have an infrastructure pipeline. The challenge is a capacity to deliver, and naturally the pipeline is certainly not the same as capacity. For consulting firms across the UK, it is generally considered a great market opportunity based on the numbers. But Professional service demand is hedged against the substantial investment, which equates to more demand than there will be supply.
The bigger underlying issue
The nature of the beast is that many programmes will be competing for the same project managers, planners, commercial specialists, engineers, designers, procurement professionals, project controls specialists and experienced programme leads. That will make capability a form of critical infrastructure. Projects will be approved, investment will be announced, and delivery organisations mobilised; however, none of those stages automatically creates the experienced resources required to turn strategy into an operational asset. Turning the abstract into practice is where we face daunting challenges.
I find this particularly imperative because the delivery problem rarely sits within one individual discipline. It appears at the interfaces.
Between strategy and implementation, design and construction, procurement and delivery and so on to client organisations, supply chains, and actual delivery on site. A programme will therefore look like a perfect structure on paper but will struggle because those components do not work in practice. This is the fundamental reason why consultancy firms crucially need to evolve.
We all need to confront consequences. Consultants have traditionally been very good at helping organisations understand what they should do. I see the next generation of infrastructure consultancy will effectively be judged on whether that advice can survive contact with delivery.
Strategies may be good but will probably not understand how the market will respond. Any procurement plan can look brilliantly efficient, but my question is always the same: will the plan produce commercial behaviours the programme actually warrants? It is the same with programme schedules that may be compliant technically, but traditionally, they will not reflect real construction sequencing, access, supply-chain constraints and interfaces.
These are completely different questions that will arise from whether the presentation is convincing or the methodology is robust. They are questions about inevitable consequences. My best infrastructure advice will not end with a recommendation. It will anticipate what will happen when my recommendation finally reaches design teams, procurement, suppliers, contractors and ultimately the people expected to build and operate the asset.
Stop treating the skills problem as a recruitment problem. One of the biggest mistakes that can be made is assuming that Britain’s infrastructure skills challenge can be solved just by recruiting more people. Recruitment is of course part of the answer, but it cannot be the entire strategy. Skills England’s most recent analysis projects a substantial increase in demand across priority construction occupations over the coming 10 years, and also highlights continuous challenges in recruiting and retaining experienced resources.
There is also an experience problem. Major and complex programmes need reliable people who have been exposed to complexity. People who recognise the warning signs of a programme beginning to drift. People who understand why a procurement decision made today may create a commercial issue three years later. That judgement takes time to develop. I suggest that we need to think differently about how capability moves around the industry.
Working within an organisation that operates across both the UK and Australian infrastructure markets has reinforced something for me: expertise should be treated as a circulatory system rather than a national stockpile. I contend that the UK can learn from major programmes that have been delivered elsewhere other than the UK, just as international markets can learn from British expertise in rail, water, programme management, engineering, commercial management and project delivery. Structured international secondments, professional exchanges and movement between major programmes should become a more normal part of developing infrastructure professionals, as we have seen through evidence-based programme delivery.
This should not be viewed simply through a lens of filling vacancies. Established properly, international mobility is by default knowledge transfer. For example, an engineer who spends many years working on a major Australian water, road or energy programme and returns to the UK does not return just as another available resource. They will bring different delivery models, commercial experiences, technologies, lessons and perspectives with them.
The same will be true in reverse. The unprecedented demands the industry faces, by circulating knowledge, will prove almost as important as creating it. Quality over quantity will suggest that for many clients, buying capability will be crucial over capacity.
Important questions
There is another uncomfortable issue for the consulting sector. Too much professional services procurement can still revolve around CVs, day rates and filling individual positions. That approach clearly has a role, particularly when clients genuinely need additional capacity. But at programme level, repeatedly moving scarce people between organisations does not solve an industry-wide skills shortage. It redistributes it. The more valuable question is what capability a consultancy leaves behind.
Did the client become better at making decisions? Did programme controls improve? Was knowledge transferred to permanent teams? Were processes simplified?
A successful consultancy engagement should ultimately make a client stronger, not permanently dependent on consultants, as we well know. That is why we have thought differently about our own commercial model too. If a consultant can solve a problem in six months rather than eighteen, the commercial model should not punish them for doing so. Clients increasingly want measurable outcomes and rightly so. Consulting models need to move in the same direction. Technology should release judgement, not replace it. Artificial intelligence will clearly influence this shift.
Over the last few years, project controls, document management, risk identification, estimating, reporting, commercial analysis and knowledge management all contain activities that can increasingly be automated or augmented. But the most valuable consequence of AI in infrastructure may be less dramatic than replacing entire professional disciplines. It may just give experienced people more time to think.
I have seen infrastructure projects produce incredible amounts of information. Highly skilled professionals still spend too much of their working lives assembling reports, locating information, reconciling systems and explaining what has already happened. If indeed technology can reduce that administrative burden, strategic-level leads can spend more time making decisions and challenging assumptions.
That is a significant productivity opportunity. But technology cannot and will not compensate for poor programme design, unclear accountability or dysfunctional commercial relationships. Digital tools amplify the system they are introduced into, yes, but if the underlying delivery model is weak, digitising it may allow problems to move faster. The next competitive advantage is integration. The consulting market often divides capability into categories: strategy, transformation, digital, programme management, engineering, commercial advisory and project controls.
Conflicting factors
Infrastructure itself is less accommodating. A reservoir, railway, energy network or defence programme does not care which consulting category an issue belongs to. It just needs the issue resolved. That means to me that the most valuable consultants of the coming decade may be those able to operate across the boundaries between strategic thinking and practical delivery.
They will understand the boardroom and the project office, commercial strategy and constructability, data and human judgement, client objectives and supply-chain reality. They will also be comfortable saying when a theoretically optimal answer will not work in practice. That ability is difficult to capture in a framework, but it is invaluable when billions of pounds of capital and years of delivery are at stake.
The real measure of consulting value. The UK’s infrastructure pipeline represents a generational opportunity, as we can see. It will improve resilience, create economic growth, modernise public services and build capability that lasts well beyond the individual programmes currently being planned. But investment announcements alone will not achieve that. The consulting industry has an important part to play, and not by supplying more people into more programmes.
The greatest contribution we can make will be helping clients create delivery environments in which good decisions happen at a faster rate, capability moves to where it is needed, knowledge is transferred rather than lost, technology improves productivity and strategy remains connected to what can actually be delivered. The next decade will not be short of infrastructure ambition. The scarce commodity will be the ability to turn that ambition into outcomes.
Ultimately, and even though it is a matrix of conflicting factors, that is how the value of consultancy should be measured: not by the volume of advice that is produced, but by what becomes possible because the advice is available.
Edward Shaw is development director at Empower Advisory, part of the BMD Group. Empower is a global advisory, project management and design business working across civil infrastructure in the UK and Australia.
