In the coming years, the new UK government will need to make tough calls on some major projects. In this article, Deloitte’s Dominic Cook explores the importance of major programme delivery in defining public trust in the state.
Governments don’t have a great reputation for delivering major projects. When it comes to the state’s grandest endeavours – like building national infrastructure – there’s a deep-rooted perception that they habitually go over budget and over schedule. In fact, our research finds that the public has less faith in governments to deliver major projects than anything else they do. I think the new administration has an opportunity turn this around: major projects should build trust in the state through their success, not erode it by their failure.
It’s easy to think that trust in government is a nice-to-have sentiment. Actually, trust matters enormously and there are real-world consequences for its absence. For some parts of the public sector, most obviously the police, it’s effectively a license to operate. But for the state more broadly, public trust is a pre-requisite for compliance with the tax system that funds our public services, the regulations that keep us safe, the nudges intend to improve public health, the democratic participation that legitimises our institutions and the shared direction that gives cohesion to our society. And that trust is going to be vital in the coming years as the government asks us to move towards a more sustainable, net zero way of life.
Deloitte’s latest State of the State survey asked the public how much it trusts different parts of the UK’s public sector across a range of capabilities. As you can see to the left of the chart below, the public largely trusts government to use up-to-date technology, which might come as a surprise to civil servants wrestling with legacy IT systems. At the other end of the chart, trust in the state trails off when it comes to delivering major projects. And it’s not just central government either – the same is true of local government and public services. While 72 per cent of the public trust the NHS to do the right thing by society, just 38 per cent believe it can deliver major projects and 53 per cent do not, giving it a net trust score of minus 15 percentage points. Even our most celebrated institution is not entirely trusted when it comes to major projects.
There are two obvious and intertwined reasons behind this lack of trust. First, experience tells us that government’s major programmes can indeed go wrong, and history is littered with high profile failures. In 1826, the project to transform George IV’s London home into Buckingham Palace had overspent by so much that the Prime Minister was forced to sack its chief architect. When work began on the Palace of Westminster two decades later, construction was expected to take six years, but it took more than 30. And this isn’t just a British problem – these stories are mirrored around the world. In 1959, the Sydney Opera House was supposed to take four years to build at a cost of $7m. When it was finished, fourteen years later, the final bill was $102m. Unfortunately, the public is so accustomed to these tales of project failure that it’s ingrained in our collective consciousness.
The second reason is that governments operate under scrutiny from parliament and attention from the press, with failures broadcast to the rest of the world. Reflect for a moment on the UK’s recent transport infrastructure success: the Elizabeth Line. Now open in full, the line connects 41 stations from east to west of London and carries an average of 550,000 passenger journeys per mid-week day. The engineering feats that made it possible included drilling two 13-mile tunnels under central London, representing the largest infrastructure project at the time in Europe. But the Elizabeth Line opened four years later than originally planned and went £4 billion over budget, and those errors were raised repeatedly throughout press coverage on the day it launched. Negativity from the media isn’t a modern phenomenon, of course. The teams that worked on Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament got the same treatment as their modern-day counterparts. They may not have been trolled by armchair pundits on social media, but satirical magazines of the day like Punch were brutal.
It’s worth reflecting for a moment on perception versus reality. While there’s no doubt that history has its fair share of major project failures, there are countless successes that never make the headlines. It’s also worth celebrating that governments’ abilities to deliver major projects have improved vastly in the past decade. Senior civil servants can now access training on how to lead and deliver big projects, from courses such as the Major Projects Leadership Academy at Saïd Business School. Government capability in this area is getting better all the time.
But there is more to be done. The new government has inherited responsibility for 244 major projects ranging from military hardware upgrades to green programmes and everything in between. And according to the Infrastructure and Projects Authority’s most recent report, 23 of those projects are rated ‘red’, which means their delivery appears unachievable. While they represent just nine per cent of the total, they collectively put £94bn of taxpayers’ money at risk.
There is a vast body of academic studies on the factors that create or diminish trust in institutions, and one factor is consistently cited: competence. That’s why major projects have an outsized role in defining public trust in government – because every failure is high-profile, erodes confidence in government’s competence, and reinforces the perception that the state struggles to deliver projects on time and to budget.
Fortunately, government can turn this into a positive. Major programmes tend to fail for the same set of reasons, and those reasons are well documented and known to major programme practitioners in the public and private sectors alike. The new administration can act on these insights to prevent hardwiring failure into projects from the start or turn them around when they are at risk.
By designing major programmes effectively at their inception, by monitoring forward-looking management information and by intervening early and decisively where problems arise, as explored in our article Delivering the Major Programme Dividend, governments can save many billions of pounds as well as change the narrative associated with major programme delivery. Major programme failure is avoidable and by making sure that they succeed, the new UK government can enhance public trust and confidence in this vital area.