Over 90% of major programmes experience cost or schedule overruns, and virtually no projects fully achieve all critical success criteria¹. This is despite the development of Integrated Assurance, a leading practice framework for managing capital programmes throughout their lifecycle, encompassing planning, coordination, and review activities designed to align with project objectives and risk profiles. Over the last decade there has been much work to promote the benefits of this approach by professional groups including the Association for Project Management (APM) and government organisations. However, we have seen inconsistent adoption of these key principles within UK capital programmes in recent years.

Mega-programmes need a governance culture that responds and adapts to emerging challenges whilst maintaining structure and focus. In contrast, assurance activities are too often initiated piecemeal as a response to live programme and project issues. These reactive approaches inevitably miss crucial opportunities for early-stage risk mitigation and are inadequate to provide confidence to stakeholders in the context of today’s complex capital projects.

The reality is that many client organisations are stretched thin, grappling with everyday skills gaps, supply chain constraints, and the sheer scale of the capital programmes required to meet investment ambitions. This creates cultural challenges, where assurance is perceived as a distraction or ‘blame game’ rather than a collaborative force for success. The statistics paint a stark picture: major programmes exhibit average cost overruns of 62%² and it is widely held that a large proportion of project failures may be attributed to inadequate identification of risks and response planning. Under-skilled project management teams are also 2.5 times less likely to meet planned outcomes and benefits³.

Building a Better Way Forward

With an estimated £700bn-£775bn of cross-sector UK infrastructure investment planned and projected over the next 10 years⁴, a new approach is clearly needed. Public sector organisations face increasing pressure to demonstrate value for money and return on investment whilst operating within tight budgetary constraints across areas including energy transition, transport and water sector modernisation. The UK construction industry is also facing economic headwinds, labour shortages, demanding net-zero goals, and ever-evolving regulations, which further compound the inherent project challenges. Within this environment, integrated assurance frameworks, linked to key decision points, programme milestones and utilising data-driven insights must become the new standard. This structured and proactive approach to project oversight should be designed and embedded within the programme from the start of the investment decision and throughout all stages of delivery. The resulting increases in confidence, collaboration and transparency are vital to the success of future large-scale capital programmes.

The Benefits of Integrated Assurance

The benefits of integrated assurance can be seen across five key areas of capital programme delivery:

Increasing Delivery Confidence

Integrated assurance isn't just a "nice-to-have"— it's a strategic imperative. In today’s challenging capital programmes environments, appropriate implementation of an integrated assurance framework should not be seen as a costly compliance exercise but rather a fundamental function to support programme performance. Indeed, we have seen the benefits of these core principles applied to sectors including nuclear decommissioning and major rail programmes to support decision making and build stakeholder confidence.

By adopting an embedded and collaborative approach to assurance, enabled by technology to leverage the power of data, organisations can significantly improve the likelihood of delivering large-scale infrastructure and capital projects on time, within budget, and with the planned outcomes and benefits.

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References

1. Source: ‘How Big things Get Done’ (D. Gardner, B. Flyvbjerg, 2022)
2. Source: ‘How Big things Get Done’ (D. Gardner, B. Flyvbjerg, 2022)
3. Source: ‘The High Cost of Low Performance’ (PMI, 2013)
4. Source: ‘Analysis of the National Infrastructure and Construction Pipeline 2023’ (Infrastructure and Projects Authority/HMT, 2024)