Nearly £89bn-worth of construction and infrastructure projects are not currently considered achievable, a Construction News analysis has found.
Data from the first National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) annual report showed that sector projects worth £88.8bn were rated Red, meaning “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable”.
Just £7.6bn-worth of projects are rated Green.
The majority of the known Red-rated costs relate to one programme – a £20bn-£53bn plan to site and construct a permanent geological disposal facility for storing radioactive waste.
A report from parliament’s Public Accounts Committee in June highlighted that the project was “considerably” delayed, with the latest date slipping from 2040 to the late 2050s.
A location for the facility has not yet been found, though government body Nuclear Waste Services is working with several councils to identify a suitable site.
Every decade of delay means Sellafield, where nuclear waste is stored, may need to construct another short-term storage building, each costing £500m-£760m, the committee warned at the time.
As previously reported, other Red-rated projects include three prison expansion programmes – but the wholelife costs of the projects have been withheld in NISTA’s report with the body citing “commercial confidentiality”.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said the schemes, which were previously rated Amber, were hit by the administration of ISG last year.
The ratings were assigned at the end of March but only made public earlier this month.
The MoJ said its Small Secure Houseblocks programme was Red-rated due to it requiring a new business case due to its costs rising. The revised case has now been approved and the project will have an Amber rating in 2025/26, it said.
HS2’s phase one is also included in the category but a cost estimate is not given as it is not known how much the rest of the multibillion-pound megaproject will need.
Eleven construction projects are rated Red, with wholelife costs provided for seven of them.
Ten projects are rated Green. NISTA defined this as: “Successful delivery of the project on time, budget and quality appears highly likely and there are no major outstanding issues that at this stage appear to threaten delivery significantly.”
The Green-rated projects include the £468m design phase of the Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project and the £2bn Home Building Fund – a lending scheme for developers.
The wholelife cost of one Green-rated project – the National Highways A428 Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet upgrade in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire – was withheld for commercial reasons.
The majority of projects are rated as Amber, meaning “delivery appears feasible but significant issues already exist, requiring management attention. These appear resolvable at this stage and, if addressed promptly, should not present a cost/schedule overrun.”
These 40 schemes are worth a combined £173bn. They include the £2.9bn Affordable Homes Programme and £3.8bn Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme.
NISTA said its ratings were “not a comprehensive reflection of project performance but reflect a project’s likelihood of success at a specific snapshot in time if issues and risks are left unaddressed”.
It added: “[Assessments] change depending on the challenges projects are facing, the results of focused independent assurance reviews and actions taken by projects. By taking the right steps following reviews and managing delivery challenges effectively, [assessments] are often improved over time.”
Ratings on four schemes were withheld altogether due to “commercial interests”.
These include Sizewell C and the establishment of Great British Nuclear’s full SMR programme.
The other two are carbon-capture and storage schemes – HyNet Anchor in North Wales and East Coast Cluster Anchor on Teesside.
Dale Vince, owner of power company Ecotricity, said on LinkedIn earlier this week: “Carbon capture and storage is an absurdly expensive technology, non-existent at commercial scale anywhere in the world – by all means explore it, but not with a £9bn spend.
“It’s a million miles off working if the plan is to dump captured carbon into a hole and forget it.”