Getting the Foundations Right

Collaborative delivery models only work when everyone is looking at the same trustworthy set of numbers. Assurance is not a bolt-on to the integrated client. It is the connective tissue.

The way infrastructure has traditionally been bought and delivered is, in the blunt words of the Institution of Civil Engineers' Project 13 work, broken. The transactional model piles up interfaces and hand-offs and pushes risk down the chain rather than sharing it. Everyone protects their own position, and the programme as a whole pays for the sum of all that self-protection.

The Institution's Infrastructure Client Group made the case in 2017 in a report titled From Transactions to Enterprises, arguing that the prevailing delivery model holds back efficient delivery and stifles innovation. Anglian Water, Heathrow, the Environment Agency, National Grid and Network Rail were among the early adopters. This is not a fringe idea.

Assurance sits at the core, not the edge

Strip away the language of collaboration and behaviours, and the practical core of the enterprise model is that everyone needs to see the same trustworthy picture of cost, risk and progress, and be rewarded against it. Take the shared picture away and the behaviours have nothing to attach to. Project 13 sets its model out across five capability pillars, integration and digital transformation among them, with the NEC4 Alliance Contract giving it a contractual home. A client claiming to be integrated but unable to see cost clearly across every partner is failing on its own stated terms.

The cheapest moment to build an assured cost base into a programme is right at the start, while the contracting approach, data standards and systems are still being chosen. Retrofit it three years into delivery, once fifteen contractors are already reporting fifteen different ways, and the work stops being a foundation and becomes underpinning a building that is already leaning.

What early looks like

East West Rail, the new line planned between Oxford and Cambridge, shows the shape of this in the open. A Development Consent Order is due for submission in 2027, and the programme has restructured its build into phased delivery packages. In 2026 it began market engagement for a long-term partner covering Integration, Technical, Operations, Assurance and Environmental services, a contract worth hundreds of millions of pounds over as much as twelve years, under an NEC4 professional services contract. Integration and assurance are named explicitly, procured early, and set up to run for the life of the programme rather than bolted on project by project.

A new railway of this kind does not sit in isolation. It connects to the existing network, shares interfaces such as signalling, and runs alongside live operational railway. Every one of those seams is a place where cost, risk and data have to line up across an organisational boundary. An integrated client with a shared, assured view of cost has a fighting chance of managing those seams. A transactional one manages them with a stack of competing spreadsheets and a great deal of goodwill, until the goodwill runs out.

Nobody cuts a ribbon for a well-assured cost base. It is, all the same, what holds the rest up.

None of this is unique to one railway. The same logic applies to any large, long-lived programme delivered through a coalition of partners, which is most major infrastructure now. The organisations that look well run in five years' time will be the ones quietly getting this right today, while it is cheap and nobody is watching, rather than the ones discovering the hard way that collaboration and a shared cost picture are not the same thing at all.

This document was produced with AI assistance. In accordance with the Human Oversight requirements of this AIMS, all AI-generated content has been reviewed, validated and approved by the Director of Black Pear Advisory Ltd before issue.

Dr Martin Perks FRICS FQSi MICW MAC

Director, Black Pear Advisory Ltd

Worcester, UK  |  +44 7771 865271