The APPG for Project Delivery's first inquiry report, published last November, offers a clear-eyed account of where UK infrastructure delivery is failing. Drawing on evidence from engineers, investors, academics, public sector leaders and members of the Association for Project Management, it reveals a system that generates impressive announcements and disappointing outcomes in roughly equal measure.
The report recommendations were the subject of a recent roundtable at the House of Commons, chaired by Henry Tufnell and attended by Becky Wood, chief executive of the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, Karina Singh, head of the government project delivery profession and senior figures from across the project delivery sector.
The report is worth reading carefully, particularly as its most important implications go well beyond infrastructure.
The valley of death is a state capacity problem
The report's central metaphor, borrowed from the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, highlights the "valley of death" that occurs between policy creation and delivery reality. Many projects fall into this gap. Ambitions are announced, strategies published, groundbreakings photographed but then all too often sustained delivery falters.
We have argued in this series that it is not a project management failure. It is a failure of the strategic state. The centre of government has historically treated political ambition, fiscal resource and delivery capability as three separate conversations. The APPG report exposes the consequences: a delivery culture that has never been fully hardwired into the machinery of government, while citizens have largely stopped believing the system can deliver on its promises.
The Association for Project Management's Chief Executive, Professor Adam Boddison OBE, welcomed the report in terms that underline the scale of what is at stake. Closing the gap between infrastructure ambition and delivery, he argued, is vital to the UK's future prosperity. We would go further: without that shift, the government's central ambition of making the UK the fastest-growing G7 economy will remain a promise the delivery system cannot honour.
The report's central recommendation calls for a radical shift in that culture. That is not a technical ask. It is a demand for a different kind of state.
The Fifth Industrial Revolution will not wait
The urgency of that cultural shift is what matters here, and it is greater now than at any previous moment. The convergence of artificial intelligence, clean energy systems and digital infrastructure that characterises the Fifth Industrial Revolution is not simply a technological transition. It is an unprecedented governance challenge. The states that navigate it successfully will be those that can build and operate complex systems at pace, learning and adapting as they go. On that measure, the UK's track record is cause for concern.
The APPG report's evidence on technology illustrates this directly. AI and data tools that could improve forecasting and risk management are available but largely unused. Traditional procurement models actively create barriers to digital innovation. As one submission put it, you do not improve delivery by throwing technology at a broken system. You fix the system, then use technology to enhance it. Fixing the system is precisely what the strategic state must do.
NISTA: Opportunity and risk
When we wrote about NISTA's first annual report for this publication last year, we identified three capabilities as paramount: strategic integration, whole-life governance, and learning at pace. The APPG inquiry suggests all three remain works in progress.
Stakeholders are clear that they do not want another passive commissioner or another layer of bureaucracy. They want a body with genuine authority to prevent projects being approved before they are ready, to sustain delivery leadership across the life of a programme, and to force the cross-government learning that the UK has consistently failed to institutionalise. The Crossrail example is instructive: vast amounts of data on delivery friction and early warning signals of delay, now largely inaccessible. Every programme that starts from scratch because its predecessors' lessons were not preserved is a programme that will rediscover problems already understood and solved elsewhere.
Institutional design only takes you so far. Those three capabilities cannot be conferred by a merger. They have to be built by people with the skills, the mandate, and critically the continuity of tenure to develop them. That means protection from ministerial churn, freedom from redeployment mid-programme, and insulation from the short-term political pressures that have historically pulled experienced delivery leaders away from the work of building lasting institutional capacity.
Rebuilding the delivery state
The report's evidence on skills points to a problem the UK has been accumulating for decades. The state has systematically hollowed out its own delivery capacity: outsourcing specialist expertise, eroding in-house engineering and project management capability, replacing institutional knowledge with rotating cohorts of external consultants.
APM's evidence to the inquiry was substantive on this point. Half of businesses already report difficulty recruiting project professionals. The nuclear sector alone will need 30,000 project management professionals by 2030. APM has called for project management training to be made mandatory for Senior Civil Servants and anyone overseeing projects worth more than £10 million, alongside a Chief Project Officer role within each government department and a National Infrastructure Delivery Skills Roadmap to secure a consistent pipeline of talent. These are sensible and overdue proposals. But they are remedies for a condition that took a long time to develop, and they will take sustained political will to implement.
The report's finding that two thirds of people feel major infrastructure projects are poorly communicated, and over half distrust the government's ability to deliver them, is not a communications problem. It is the long-term consequence of repeated delivery failure. Rebuilding that trust requires a state that visibly knows how to get things done.
What a strategic state would actually do
A strategic state, as we have defined it in this series, is not a large state or a small state. It is a capable one. It embeds delivery expertise at the policymaking stage, not as an afterthought. It protects long-term programmes from ministerial churn. It treats data, skills and institutional memory as national assets. And it rebuilds public-private relationships on the basis of shared outcomes rather than adversarial contracts.
The APPG report is addressed to ministers. APM's response to it is addressed to the profession. Our argument is that its implications are generational and reach both audiences simultaneously. As Professor Boddison noted, embedding project expertise at every stage, from policy design to on-the-ground execution, is how national infrastructure projects get delivered efficiently, sustainably and with lasting social and economic benefit. That is also a description of what the strategic state looks like when it is working.
The infrastructure of Britain's future prosperity is not only the roads, railways and energy systems described in the APPG report's pages. It is the institutional capacity to build and sustain them. That is where the strategic state either proves itself, or fails to do so.
Patrick Diamond is professor of public policy at Queen Mary University of London and a former head of policy planning in No.10. Vijay K. Luthra is a public service transformation specialist and former civil servant, local government councillor, school governor and NHS NED