Projects Don't Go Wrong. They Start Wrong.

What HS2's contract reset tells us : and what Team Stadium taught me.

Ross Fitzgerald, Managing Director, Integrate Projects Ltd

Last week HS2 Ltd announced it had renegotiated its contracts with two of the four civil engineering joint ventures building the route: EKFB, and Align : the JV of Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine and VolkerFitzpatrick. Between them, over 100km of railway. The stated reason for the reset was that the original contracts did a poor job of encouraging efficient delivery and left almost all of the risk sitting with the taxpayer, with no meaningful incentive to hit cost or programme targets. By 2024, the £15bn earmarked in 2020 for Phase 1's main civils had been spent : with the works nowhere near finished.

The Minister of State for Rail, Lord Hendy, said the waste and mismanagement of the past are now behind us.

I hope he's right. But read that first paragraph again, because it contains the whole lesson of British infrastructure in a single sentence.

The contracts were wrong. Not the tunnelling. Not the viaducts. Not the people in the site cabins at six in the morning. The contracts. The commercial model. The risk allocation. The incentives. All of it fixed, signed and sealed years before a single machine turned.

That's the point I want to make, and I want to make it plainly: projects don't go wrong. They start wrong. Everything that follows : the overruns, the claims, the adversarial meetings, the reset : is simply the arithmetic of the start working itself out in public, at great expense, over a decade.

The tragedy of the front end

Ask anyone in our industry where a project is lost and they'll point to a moment on site. A late design freeze. A subcontractor insolvency. A ground condition nobody expected. Those are symptoms. The disease was contracted in the front end: in the way risk was allocated to the party least able to price it, in the incentive structure that paid people for effort rather than outcome, in the procurement route chosen for defensibility rather than delivery, in the eighteen months of tendering that ground the goodwill out of the supply chain before anybody had shaken hands.

And around all of that, we have built a consenting and assurance culture of quite extraordinary weight. Environmental statements running to tens of thousands of pages. Years in hybrid Bill and DCO process. A bat protection structure reported at around £100m : for bats. Every one of those decisions was made by an intelligent person acting rationally within a system that rewards the avoidance of criticism above the delivery of anything. Nobody has ever been sacked for commissioning another study. Careers are ended by building the wrong thing quickly; they are quietly sustained by building nothing slowly.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is screeching ahead. China has laid more than 45,000km of high-speed rail since 2008. Riyadh has delivered a six-line, 176km metro from a standing start in a little over a decade. I am not naive about the trade-offs : I don't want their planning systems, their scrutiny standards or their labour models, and neither should you. But I refuse to accept that the only alternative to their pace is our paralysis. Somewhere between the two sits a country that can consent a scheme in reasonable time, contract it intelligently, and let its builders build.

Because : and this is the part I really want people to hear : we are so much better than this.

Team Stadium

In 2007 I joined the procurement team on the London 2012 Olympic Stadium, delivered by Sir Robert McAlpine under a banner that everybody on that job knew by heart: Team Stadium. I was there from the very beginning, leading on the Mechanical & Electrical works packages, and I led the introduction of the CompeteFor tender system that opened the supply chain up to firms that would never previously have got near a project of that scale.

Then the global financial crisis arrived. Right on top of us. You could argue : and people have : that fear focused minds wonderfully, and there's something in that. But it isn't the real story, and I was there.

The real story was alignment. An entire country and an entire delivery team pulling in one direction, towards one immovable date, for one shared prize. There was no traditional hierarchy imposed on that job. There was leadership : clear, capable, professional leadership, and I mean very clear. But that leadership spent its authority not on control but on empowerment. Subcontractors. Staff. Cleaners. Caterers. Everyone was invited to own the outcome, to take pride in it, and : the thing that makes all the rest possible : to be trusted.

We delivered it early. Under budget. In front of the world.

That is not nostalgia. That is evidence. Evidence that the British construction industry, when it is set up correctly at the start, is as good as anything on earth.

What actually transfers

The lesson of Team Stadium is not "be more collaborative", which is the sort of thing that gets printed on a poster in a site canteen and ignored by lunchtime. Alignment is not a value. It is a structure. It is designed, deliberately, before contracts are let:

• A single, unambiguous definition of success that every party in the chain can recite.

• Risk placed with the party that can actually manage it : and priced honestly when it can't be.

• Incentives that pay for outcome, not activity, all the way down the tiers, not just at the top.

• Early involvement of the people who will build it, at a point when their knowledge can still change the design.

• Leadership that is visible and generous with credit : because trust is a commercial asset, and it compounds.

You cannot bolt any of this on afterwards. You cannot renegotiate your way to it in year eight. HS2's reset may well be the right and necessary thing to do now, but it is a repair, and repairs are always more expensive than getting it right the first time. The commercial model is not the paperwork that follows the strategy. It is the strategy.

Building back better

Here is the reason I'm optimistic rather than merely cross.

Align JV counts Sir Robert McAlpine among its partners : the same contractor that gave us Team Stadium, now delivering the Colne Valley Viaduct and the Chiltern Tunnel, the longest structures of their kind on the route. Those are world-class assets. They were built by British-based teams and British supply chains, on British soil, and nobody who has stood underneath that viaduct thinks this country has forgotten how to build.

We haven't forgotten how to build. We've forgotten how to start.

So let this reset be more than a rewrite of payment mechanisms. Let it be the moment we accept that the hardest, most valuable and most neglected work on any major programme happens before the ink is dry : and that the money we save there is the only money nobody ever has to argue about later.

Get the start right, and the rest is just construction. And at construction, we are magnificent.

At Integrate Projects Ltd, we specialise in construction procurement and commercial management consultancy working across NEC4, JCT, FIDIC and VOB/B. We work at the front end : where projects are won or lost. Whether you are navigating complex infrastructure project management or refining your strategic construction procurement, our expertise in construction consultancy and construction commercial services ensures absolute clarity from day one. Explore our about us page or contact us today to discuss your next programme. If your programme hasn't started yet, that's the best news you'll hear all year.

Source: Construction Enquirer, "HS2 renegotiates contracts with construction giants", 31 July 2026.