The 20th century playbook.

What the playbook produces

The all-risk, lump sum, single stage tender is the clearest expression of the old playbook, and it is still being recommended on projects where it has no business being recommended. Complex scope, immature design, real construction risk, supply chain that needs to be brought into the conversation early, and the consultant's first move is to package it up, hand it over the wall, and ask the contractors to price it.

The tender returns come back inflated, because contractors are not naive. They know what they are being asked to carry. They price every risk they can see, and they hedge against the ones they cannot. The winning bid is rarely the most competitive one. It is the most optimistic one, which is a different thing.

Then the project starts and the risks the design did not resolve begin to surface. Each one becomes a change event. Each change event becomes a commercial argument. By month nine, the contractor is defending the optimism they priced at tender. By month eleven, the client is wondering why the cost certainty they paid for has evaporated. By month fourteen, the correspondence has turned into a letter-writing exercise that everyone in the room recognises as the prelude to a claim.

"The winning bid is rarely the most competitive one. It is the most optimistic one. The two are not the same thing."

The project gets built, eventually, at a price the client did not plan for, on a programme that has slipped, with a final account that is negotiated rather than administered. None of this is incompetence. The people are usually serious, experienced, technically capable. The problem is that they are working inside a model that produces this outcome regardless of who is operating it.

The HS2 reviews said it in public

The pattern is documented at scale in the public record. The Oakervee Review, commissioned by government, concluded that HS2's procurement and contracting approach had inflated prices on the Main Works Civils contracts and that, in hindsight, the approach had been unsuccessful. The project's executive chairman told the Public Accounts Committee that 89 per cent of the cost increase from 2020 onwards was attributable to the contract form alone. The cost hike on the civils contracts reached £6.1 billion. The National Audit Office, which audits public spending and reports to Parliament, found there was insufficient certainty on the design to set cost and schedule estimates effectively, and little commercial consequence for contractors starting construction before the design was confirmed.

These are the visible cases because they are very large and the audit reports are public. The same pattern runs through every regional capital expenditure programme in the country. The new warehouse that overran. The office refurbishment that ended in claims. The campus rebuild settled by negotiation. None of those generate parliamentary hearings, but most estates directors who have been in post for ten years have at least one of them in their history.

"The mechanism is identical. Just smaller. The procurement route was wrong for the project."

Why the defences do not stand up

The defence of the old playbook comes in two versions. The first is that it offers price certainty. It does not. The final account on a single stage lump sum job almost never matches the contract sum. The gap is filled with variations, loss and expense claims, relevant events, and negotiated settlements. What the client bought was a starting number, not a final one.

The second defence is that it transfers risk to the contractor. It transfers the risk in form, not in substance. The contractor prices the risk into the tender, and then fights to recover it when it materialises. The client pays for the risk at tender, pays again at claims, and pays a third time in the deterioration of the supply chain relationship that will be needed for the next project.

What has actually changed, and the part the traditional firms have not priced into their own thinking yet, is that modern contracts do not require the operating model the firms are organised around. Activity schedules have replaced measured quantities. Payment follows activity completion. The mechanical measurement work that justified a separate commercial discipline is being automated out of existence. Artificial intelligence will do takeoff faster and more accurately than any human quantity surveyor. What is left, once measurement is no longer the job, is commercial judgement.

The fee position is the tell

Traditional quantity surveying fee scales were calibrated around measurement effort that modern contracts no longer generate. Firms are still charging for a workflow the contract does not require, and clients are still paying it because it has always been paid. Pricing against the actual work produces lower fees naturally. That is not a discount and it is not a race to the bottom. It is honest pricing against what the contract actually needs.

"The fee scale and the workflow are both inherited from a contract type that has effectively disappeared."

There is a question worth asking of any consultancy on a new appointment. Would you recommend this procurement route if your firm were organised differently? If the answer is no, the recommendation is about the firm, not the project. If the answer is yes, the firm should be able to say why, in terms of the specific scope certainty, design maturity and risk allocation the project actually has. A recommendation that begins with the project can land anywhere. A recommendation that begins with the firm lands in the same place every time, which is why the outcomes also land in the same place every time.

Where the market is moving

The collaborative procurement routes exist. Two Stage, Target Cost, NEC Options A, C and E, early contractor involvement, framework alliances, integrated project insurance. The Construction Playbook, the UK government's procurement guidance, documents them. The public sector has adopted them. The serious private sector clients on capital expenditure have moved to them. The firms still defaulting to single stage all-risk lump sum on complex projects are not holding a technical position. They are holding a commercial one, shaped by the structure of their own business.

The 20th century playbook had its reasons. It was written for a different contracting environment, a different legal framework, a different set of tools, and a different set of client expectations. It worked, in its time, for the projects it was designed for. It has not worked for the projects of the last twenty years, and the evidence has been accumulating in plain sight. The reason it is still being sold is that it still pays the people selling it.

The clients who have stopped buying the old playbook are the ones who have been through the cycle once or twice and recognised the pattern. They are not the largest segment of the market yet. They are the segment that will shape what comes next.