Project delivery

The state of play

It has not been a good year for project delivery. HS2 has been lopped down to a remnant of its original route amid ballooning costs. The government’s plan to build 40 new hospitals by 2030 has also gone awry, as it has been forced to push eight of the schemes beyond that target due to the crisis over unsafe concrete. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have all but abandoned their housing targets at a time when punishingly high interest rates are making it near-impossible for young people to buy their first home. 

Modern methods of construction (MMC), the go-to solution for many of these problems, is hardly in good health either. The built environment’s great hope for bringing down project costs and speeding up delivery has fallen on hard times, a victim of many of the forces that have caused problems elsewhere in the industry.