Problem Register - #11 · Democracy, Elections & Devolution; cross-cutting
State capacity and the delivery of major projects
Priority Score
- Scale5/5
- Severity3/5
- Cost of inaction5/5
- Tractability3/5
- Deliverability2/5
- Cross-partisan viability4/5
- Time-criticality3/5
Seven dimensions, each scored 1-5 and summed to a total out of 35. It is a triage and communication tool to compare problems - not a measure of truth. How it is derived is set out in The Method.
The problem
Government in the UK has a persistent, well-documented difficulty turning policy intentions into delivered results. Major projects run over time and budget; large technology programmes fail or stall; and Whitehall has, over decades, hollowed out its own capability to specify, buy and manage complex delivery. This is the enabling problem: every other entry in this Register depends on a state that can actually execute.
The evidence
The government's portfolio of major projects runs to a whole-life cost in the hundreds of billions of pounds, with a significant share rated as in doubt for deliverability. The National Audit Office has found billions of pounds in avoidable extra cost across government digital programmes - from "resets" and from running legacy systems long past their planned life - and attributes much poor delivery to government's weakness as an "intelligent client": too little digital, commercial and project skill held in-house.
Why the market fails
This is not a market failure but a government-created and government-owned problem - included precisely because the Method recognises that fixing the state's own failures is a legitimate, high-return target. A capable state is itself a kind of public good: everyone relies on it, and no market provides it.
Why it has persisted
The incentives in government reward announcement over delivery; ministerial and senior-official turnover is rapid, so few people own a project end to end; capability, once outsourced, is hard to rebuild; and "machinery of government" changes repeatedly reorganise responsibility. The costs of weak delivery are diffuse and slow to surface, so reform is never urgent.
Who bears the cost
The public, who receive late, expensive or failed services; taxpayers, through overruns; and every good policy that founders on an inability to implement it.
Policy direction - outline only
Proposed mechanism
A deliberate insourcing of core digital, commercial and project skills; stable senior accountability for major projects, with a named owner who stays with a project; transparent, independent reporting of project status; and a "implementation-ready" standard for policy before launch - close to what this institute exists to produce.
Must resolve
How to pay for scarce technical skills within public-pay constraints; how much to centralise delivery expertise; and how to protect honest status reporting from political pressure.
Main risks
Reform fatigue; insourcing announced without the skills actually recruited; transparency diluted the moment it becomes politically uncomfortable.