Wednesday's Budget was a Budget about who gets to spend the money. It moved power to mayors, put buyers back into new-build showrooms and asked for more apprentices on public projects. What it didn't ask is who will actually deliver any of it.
That is the question I want to deal with here. I trained as a quantity surveyor at Sir Robert McAlpine and left contracting as a Commercial Manager. Today I advise clients and contractors on the leadership behind major programmes: who runs them, what they need, and why they succeed or stall. From where I sit, the constraint on what the Chancellor announced isn't money. It's people.
The short version
- Devolution hands mayors long-term income and borrowing power. Most combined authorities don't yet have the client-side teams to spend it well.
- Housing got the demand-side help housebuilders asked for, but not the cost relief, and the OBR expects it to barely move supply.
- Skills got a welcome apprentice target, with no answer to who supervises them.
- The gap running through all three is the senior client-side leader: the person who has made the big calls before and can hold a contractor to account.
Devolution: the money arrives before the capability
The Chancellor called it the most radical act of devolution in a generation, and on paper it is. Mayors keep 100% of business rates by the end of the decade and a share of income tax from 2028. There is £1.5bn of borrowing for mayoral authorities to build infrastructure, and £285m of growth funding to get started.
The important change is that this is income mayors can borrow against. West Yorkshire's mayor was quick to point out it means long-term borrowing for big schemes, rather than going cap in hand to the Treasury. As a southerner living in the north, I'll happily stop hearing that everything gets decided in London.
But a revenue stream isn't a programme. Somebody has to write the business case, choose the procurement route, set the commercial strategy and then sit across the table from a Tier 1 when the first claim lands. Combined authorities have spent years administering grants. Very few have built the client-side teams that run £500m schemes.
AtkinsRéalis made the same point on the day: devolution only works if local leaders have the capacity to plan and design schemes properly. I'd go further. It only works if they can hire the people who have done it before.
Housing: half of what the housebuilders wanted
The government's approach to housing is now clear. Get buyers moving, protect margins, and let the market do the rest.
| Measure | What it does |
|---|---|
| Your First Home | £4.7bn of equity loans over five years. Buyers borrow 20% of a new-build's value with a 2.5% deposit. England only, from next spring. |
| Income caps | £110,000 outside London, £140,000 in London, raised from the original plan |
| Social and affordable | An extra £1.5bn, plus VAT-free land sold to social housing providers |
| Regulation | No major building regulation changes this Parliament, except for safety |
| Brownfield | Biodiversity net gain removed for brownfield sites up to 1.5 hectares |
Housebuilder shares rose while the Chancellor was still on his feet, with Vistry up almost 5%. So did they get what they wanted?
Half of it. They asked for help with demand and got a scheme that looks a lot like Help to Buy. They also asked for relief from the cost of building, and mostly didn't get it. The HBF welcomed the scheme but noted the brownfield change helps a relatively small number of urban sites, and that the wider regulatory and policy costs remain considerable. The Construction Products Association pointed out that gas prices for many supply chain firms have risen 300% in a year, and the Budget did little about it.
The harder number comes from the OBR. It expects net additions to the housing stock to fall to around 230,000 this year, and 190,000 fewer homes by 2030/31 than it forecast in March. It judges the new scheme will have only a marginal effect on supply.
We have been here before. Help to Buy got people through the door from 2013 to 2022. It didn't build the capacity to deliver more homes, and plenty would argue it pushed prices up instead. Demand was never the whole problem. Delivery was, and delivery comes down to people: site teams, commercial teams and, on the public side, the clients who commission social and affordable homes.
Skills: apprentices need supervisors
The Budget sets an expectation that apprentices make up at least 3% of the workforce on large government construction and infrastructure projects, backed by £100m for a local apprenticeship service.
I'm all for it. But an apprentice needs a supervisor, and a supervisor needs a leader who stays long enough to build a team. The industry's problem has never just been the number coming in at the bottom. It's the thinning layer of experienced people in the middle and at the top, the ones who train, supervise and set the standard.
Industry voices were quick to flag the cost of supervision, particularly for specialist firms and SMEs. Without that layer, a 3% target becomes a box to tick rather than a pipeline.
The real constraint: the client's chair
When I was training as a QS, the best client-side people I came across could find where the money was hiding in a contractor's valuation in ten minutes. They knew which claims were real and which were opening positions. They had made the big calls before and lived with the consequences.
There were never many of them. There are fewer now, and they are being pulled in every direction at once. The New Hospital Programme, nuclear, the water companies' investment programmes and the data centre boom are all chasing the same small pool. This Budget adds every combined authority in England, each with its own flagship scheme and new borrowing to fund it, plus councils and housing providers commissioning social and affordable homes.
In June I wrote that the money is there, but the people aren't. This Budget puts more money on the table and widens that gap.
The pattern I see across these programmes is consistent. Many leaders are stepping up into a seat for the first time, where every decision is public and nobody below them will say "I think you're wrong." They are rarely short of ability. They are short of someone who has sat in that chair before.
So here is my prediction. The next constraint on regional infrastructure and housing won't be funding. It will be the handful of people in each region who can run a programme from the client side.
What clients should do about it
If you are a council, trust, combined authority or housing provider about to be handed a budget, there are three things to put in place before you announce the scheme, not after.
1. Experienced challenge before the big calls. Before you sign off a cost plan, choose a procurement route or respond to a contractor's claim, get someone in the room who has made that exact call. Not a consultancy with a delivery team to sell you next. A small number of people who have sat in your chair, matched to the problem you actually have, for as long as that problem lasts. 2. Backing for the person carrying it. Call it oversight mentoring. Not a leadership course, and not someone taking decisions for you. It's listening to what your people already know and nudging them in the right direction. You've already paid for the skill set. This is about getting the most out of it. 3. Hire the commercial lead first. The best schemes I've seen appointed their senior commercial and programme people before the announcement, not as a scramble afterwards.
On public programmes, almost nobody budgets for the first two. They are cheap next to the cost of one bad procurement decision or one leader burning out in their first year.
The question that matters
This was a careful Budget. It handed out money and power, and avoided spooking anyone. That's fine as far as it goes.
But every scheme it makes possible will succeed or fail on a few people: the ones who commission it, challenge it and carry it when it gets hard. If you've just been handed a budget and a programme, the question isn't only who you hire. It's who you call when it gets hard.
If that's a conversation you want to have, my door is open.
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