The amber trap
I am aware that I am probably an anomaly. Someone who reads NISTA major portfolio reports in my spare time. But the reason I do, stems from a career of working in, and caring about government delivery. Whether that's from being a taxpayer, a civil servant, a consultant, or just a citizen who cares about the government's ability to deliver for the nation. Particularly at a point in time where trust in government is at an all time low.
On the 13th of July, NISTA published the latest Major projects annual report. The framing of which is 'strong foundations for delivery.' The scale of what's covered is hard to wrap a brain around. £924.2bn of whole life cost, across 189 major programmes. Many running for a decade or more. The thing that stands out for me, is that 58% of those are rated amber. Hold that thought.
What amber means
The official definition is that delivery is still feasible. But "significant issues exist and need management attention." The definition assumes that amber is a waypoint. Something that you pass through on the way to green (or red.) It means we are not confident that we can succeed. But we are not stopping it either. It's a safe option. It keeps the programme alive, the SRO in post and pushes the harder conversation back.
The upside
It's not all negative. 18 programmes moved from amber to green. 26 left having delivered, up from 14 in the previous report. Red rose by only three. And the portfolio has just been refocused, from 189 programmes down to around 80 of the most nationally significant, with the rest moving into departmental oversight. Tightening focus is good, if it means programmes get the support they need, or get stopped.
The flat line
Here is the thing that gets lost. NISTA has its own long-run measure of portfolio health: score every project one for green, two for amber, three for red, and average it. On that measure, health worsened steadily from 2013 to 2020, and then flatlined. It has sat at amber for around five years. Not improving. Not deteriorating. Resting.
But that drop from 189 to 80 also means that 109 major programmes are lost from sight. Sliding back into departmental portfolios that publish less information. The new (AI) early warning system is designed to catch programmes that are sliding towards red. But nothing is looking for programmes that are sitting in amber for year after year. Reporting over previous years maintained a consistent view of that problem and that has just been lost. Albeit I'm sure for well intentioned reasons.
Why nobody stops
Amber signals that someone, somewhere knows that something is wrong. That's not nothing. It's better than the alternative. But awareness without action is just expensive anxiety.
The accountability gap is structural. On the one hand, the accountability burden on Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) is increasing as programmes grow in size and cost. Perversely, also moving the accountable leaders further and further from the information about frontline delivery.
And at the same time SROs are leaving. One in ten civil servants either moves between departments or leaves the service entirely each year, and that figure excludes moves within departments, so the real churn is higher. You cannot hold a programme to account when the person accountable is no longer there. You cannot learn from delivery when the people who delivered have moved on. Programmes get longer, larger and more complex. The risk is growing for individuals and delivery itself.
Governance grows with it. I've watched it happen across my career. More boards, more managers, more layers, more reviews, more reporting. The project delivery community has grown from around 10,000 people in 2018 to over 26,000 today. Not all of that is oversight, much of it is capability we badly needed. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: more distance between the people making decisions and the people doing the work. We are adding observers to a system that needs faster decisions, and asking leaders to shoulder ever larger investments while making it harder for them to reach the information they need to do it.
Programmatic incentives compound the problem. Reporting against a plan rewards adherence to that plan. Not making changes to move towards the desired outcome. The honest programme. The one that surfaced a problem and changed course six months ago. Looks worse on paper than the one that quietly re-baselined and kept the rating green. So people learn to report in a way that protects them. The decision makers are too far from the delivery and the data stops being useful.
This isn't weakness or dishonesty. It's a rational response to a system that has made decisions slow, honesty expensive, and course correction look like failure. The system produces this behaviour reliably, across administrations, leaders and departments. That is a design problem. The crisis that's growing, is that we are doubling down on that approach. Not re-thinking it in the face of growing evidence.
And all of that matters because we are failing to deliver. To spend taxpayer's money wisely is not just failing to deliver what people need from society. It's creating a truth gap between the government and the people it serves. And the results of that can be catastrophic for individuals and society. Whether it's a broken healthcare system or a loss of trust in government.
Trust, not delivery
Transformation happens at the speed of trust. The delivery problem is downstream of a trust problem.
A system that adds distance between delivery and decisions will fail. Accountability that punishes honesty gets dishonesty in return. A system that makes stopping feel more dangerous than failing will keep producing programmes that fail. A system that treats rebaselining as risk management will keep accumulating strategic debt it cannot repay.
Meanwhile the costs mount and critical services continue to fail the people who need them. This is not an abstraction. It is a silent epidemic. But it is tractable.
The alternative is not theoretical. Rather than growing governance and applying more of the same, there is a way to reduce delivery risk by changing the approach: shortening planning windows, delegating authority closer to delivery, and creating accountability structures that generate trust rather than consuming it. I've done it. Others are doing it at scale. But currently these are exceptions. The challenge is how we make these things the norm at a time where the failure is mounting, and the pressure is increasing.
The deeper fault
The NAO documents failure with rigour and courage. But the model ("did you deliver what you promised in the plan?") creates an incentive to promise more convincingly rather than forecast more honestly.
There is a deeper structural gap that neither culture nor accountability reform fixes: the approval process asks teams to name a preferred option and model its benefits before they know which option is right. That is a system built to perform certainty. It needs a real route for phased business cases that fund discovery rather than a predetermined answer. That's a piece in its own right, and one I'll come back to.
There are bigger forces in the background too, the way capital and running costs are treated as separate and unequal, which shapes what government feels able to spend money on. Another day.
The way out
Amber is not a project status. It's a symptom of a system of delivery that is at risk of doubling down rather than changing course. Amber is a decision deferred.
There is a better way, and it isn't more of the same governance. It's thinking about delivery differently. Shifting accountability from plans to outcomes. Reducing the food mileage of decisions. Building teams inside programmes whose job is to improve the conditions for delivery. Recognising and rewarding honesty.
None of these are exhaustive, and none are hypothetical. I've done them in large programmes, as have others. Each is a piece I'll write over the coming weeks.
I'm setting this up because I think that, although I am likely in a minority reading these reports and thinking about these challenges, I am not alone. There's a fighting chance that if we get the right minds together, share the stories of what works and what doesn't openly and honestly, we might make a meaningful change to a system that is critical to people's lives. And in trouble.