In conversation with Andrew Baldwin: the politics of projects in Westminster and turning research into political impact

Welcome to our Dods Research interview series. This is where we usually talk with leading academics in the UK about their area of expertise and what they can tell us about UK politics. This time, we decided to do something different, and our latest edition features a special guest: Andrew Baldwin, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the Association for Project Management.

Introduction

Joshua Wells:  To start, big picture: for the Association for Project Management, what is your public policy mission? What are you actually trying to achieve?

Andrew Baldwin: APM is the chartered body for the project professional. We have a Royal Charter and a charitable object, which is all about advancing the science, theory and practice of project management for the public benefit.

We’ve got around 45,000 members worldwide. The way I always explain it is: if you hire an architect, you’d want them to be Chartered and a member of RIBA; if you hire a solicitor, you want to know they’re part of the Law Society. It’s the same with us. If you’re delivering a major project, you really want your project professionals to know what they’re doing, be engaged in CPD, and to meet a recognised professional standard.

Why public policy matters for projects

Joshua Wells: Is it inevitable that APM ends up deeply involved in public policy? Where does that interest come from?

Andrew Baldwin: For us, it comes from a long-standing challenge. For years we’ve known that major projects often go wrong, and we broadly know why they go wrong. Yet governments around the world – not just in the UK – seem to keep repeating the same mistakes. The same problems appear again and again in big public projects.

That’s really why we started commissioning research like this latest report. We wanted to ask: why are political projects different? What is it about politically-driven projects in Westminster and the wider public sector that sets them apart from those in the private sector?

Joshua Wells: So are political projects making a particular type of mistake – something different to what you would see in a private company?

Andrew Baldwin: I wouldn’t say they make completely different mistakes. Often the same mistakes show up, just with bigger consequences.

If you read National Audit Office reports on major government projects, a lot of the findings are very familiar. Leadership issues, unclear accountability, churn in key roles. You’ll see things like project managers being brought in, then immediately seconded to something else. You lose continuity and oversight. Or sponsors and senior responsible owners who don’t fully understand their roles – no one really taking accountability.

It’s that sort of pattern that repeats. The politics adds extra pressure and visibility, but the underlying project issues are recognisable.

APM’s impact

Joshua Wells: That gives you a very clear motive to get involved in public policy, especially given the scale of public projects. Are there particular achievements in that space that you or APM are especially proud of?

Andrew Baldwin: One area I’d highlight is our contribution to the professionalisation of the project function in government.

There’s a body called the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority – NISTA – which brings together the old Infrastructure and Projects Authority with the National Infrastructure Commission. The idea is to strengthen central capability for delivering major infrastructure and transformation projects.

We’ve been supportive of that direction of travel: getting serious senior responsible owners into major projects, improving oversight and capability, and ultimately making sure taxpayers’ money is used more effectively. I’d see our role in pushing for that professionalisation as an achievement, though there’s a lot more to do.

The challenge, of course, is that good projects are often invisible. No one cares about them if they go right.

Part of our job is to build a more mature understanding of what constitutes a good project, especially in public policy. Often the real benefits only become clear years after delivery. Think of London’s Victorian embankments – built over a century ago, still delivering enormous public value.

Contemporary public policy challenges

Joshua Wells: That point about timescale is a useful bridge to the next question: what do you see as the main contemporary public policy challenges from APM’s perspective?

Andrew Baldwin: Some of them we’ve already touched on. Professionalisation of project management in government is ongoing. Bodies like NISTA need the remit and the funding to do their job properly. There’s a worry that, especially after tight budgets, money will be squeezed just as we need to be investing in better delivery.

But if I had to pick the biggest challenge at the moment, I’d say skills. There aren’t enough project managers in the world, let alone in the UK. And many of the ones we do have are being enticed elsewhere.

You can’t speed up apprenticeships. You can’t compress a university degree into six months. We need more people coming through the pipeline, and we need them fast. But every industry is competing for the same talent.

Another challenge is about the life cycle of policy and projects. At the moment, in government, policy is usually designed first. A policy team comes up with an idea, develops it, polishes the announcement. Only once it becomes official policy do the project managers get called in and asked, “Right, how are we going to deliver this?”

APM would like to see that flipped. We’d like delivery people involved at the policy design stage, asking questions like: “Is this deliverable? Have you thought about it this way? What benefits are you actually trying to create?” If you don’t do that, you risk projects being doomed to failure before they’ve even started.

Why APM commissions research

Joshua Wells: APM commissions quite a lot of research. Why do you do it, and what are you trying to achieve with reports like The Politics of Projects in Westminster and Public Sector Initiatives?

Andrew Baldwin: At one level, it comes straight back to our charitable object: advancing the science and theory of project management. To do that, we need to support academics to push the boundaries of what we know.

The politics of projects is an area that really hasn’t been explored enough. We know why projects fail in technical terms; we don’t fully understand how politicians influence that failure or success. Anecdotally, people will say, “If you’ve got a good minister, the project will fly; if you’ve got a bad one, forget it.” But there hasn’t been enough rigorous work on how that plays out in practice.

More broadly, commissioning research helps project management grow as an academic discipline. It used to sit mainly in engineering or construction departments; now it’s increasingly recognised as a subject in its own right.

All of that feeds into our strapline: when projects succeed, society benefits. If even a handful of our recommendations are taken up by government, and that improves the success rate of public projects, there’s a very clear public good.

Turning research into political impact

Joshua Wells: Once you’ve got a report, what do you actually do with it? How do you try to turn research into impact?

Andrew Baldwin: Our first step is to take those findings into Parliament, perhaps through the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Project Delivery. We can run a session where the researchers present to MPs and Peers, and we have a structured discussion about what needs to change.

Ideally, that might lead to concrete proposals that we can then pursue with government departments. I’d love to see a full parliamentary debate on this at some point.

We’re already sending the report to ministers and MPs – the usual suspects who are interested in infrastructure, public spending and so on – and the next stage is following up to see where we can make progress.

APPGs and cross-party politics

Joshua Wells: A lot of readers will have been to an APPG meeting, but far fewer will know what it’s like to help run one or how to make them actually useful. Has the APPG on Project Delivery been a good vehicle for this work?

Andrew Baldwin: Honestly, it is hard work. It is not for the faint-hearted.

There are excellent APPGs on the built environment and on infrastructure, and they do good work. But we wanted something focused specifically on delivery – on why projects struggle and what can be done better.

So it’s not an APPG for project management as a profession; it’s an APPG for project delivery – the doing rather than the idea. It could easily become a talking shop if we’re not careful, so we’ve been very deliberate about grounding it in evidence and in practical recommendations.

On cross-party engagement, I’d say this is one of the rare areas that genuinely unites MPs. Every major party has been in government at some point and has had manifesto promises blocked or derailed by project failures. They may disagree ferociously on which projects should go ahead, but on the basics – taxpayers’ money should be spent well, projects should succeed, society benefits when they do – there’s strong agreement.

Key findings from The Politics of Projects in Westminster

Joshua Wells: Let’s get into the report itself. Were there particular findings or recommendations that you found especially useful or striking?

Andrew Baldwin: Two stand out for me, though the whole report is valuable.

The first is the recommendation about over-emphasis on economic value. At the moment, benefit realisation is often boiled down to financial metrics. But many public projects cannot and should not be judged on economics alone.

Take an aircraft carrier. On narrow economic grounds, you could probably argue it’s poor value. But in terms of defending the UK and projecting capability, it’s essential. Similarly, cultural and social benefits are frequently underplayed – community cohesion, local pride, environmental improvements.

What we’d like to see is a more rounded approach to benefits: economic, yes, but also social, cultural and strategic. That goes right back to our strapline: if projects succeed, society benefits – not just the Treasury.

The second theme is understanding. I don’t think most people – including many politicians – really “get” what project delivery involves.

Government announces a megaproject: “We will build X, for Y billion, by Z date.” Public and media expectations fix on those numbers. But then scope changes, tunnels are added, routes are altered, environmental mitigations are layered in, and unsurprisingly the cost and timescale shift. HS2 is the obvious example.

Yet debate often stays locked on the original headline figures, as if nothing has changed. A more sophisticated understanding of how projects evolve would help enormously – in Parliament, in Whitehall, and among the public.

Who needs to understand projects better?

Joshua Wells: When you talk about “understanding”, whose understanding are we talking about? Politicians? Officials? Local communities?

Andrew Baldwin: Honestly, all of the above.

Politicians, for a start, need a clearer sense of their role in projects – what they should promise and what they realistically can’t. The worst situation is when a politician stands up and says, “We will deliver this by this date,” when anyone with project experience knows it’s wildly optimistic.

At the public level, as soon as I get into a taxi and say I work for APM, I get: “Why did that cost so much? What a waste of money.” And from their individual perspective, that might be understandable. But you also have to weigh the benefits to a wider group – maybe 10 other communities who gain significantly.

So yes, we need a better grasp of project benefits at community level as well: recognising that some people will lose out from particular schemes, but that there can still be a legitimate public good overall.

On the parliamentary side, I’d love to see committees like the Public Accounts Committee scrutinise not just the balance sheet but the people. If a megaproject has gone wrong, they should be asking: who is the project manager? What are their qualifications? Are they a member of APM or PMI? Are they a chartered project professional? If you had a complex building design in front of you, you’d absolutely ask, “Are you a chartered architect?” We should treat project professionals the same way.

Select committees

Joshua Wells: The report also touches on select committees –one of recommendations relates to a committee focused on public projects and infrastructure, what are your thoughts on that?

Andrew Baldwin: The current Labour government has clearly put infrastructure at the heart of its agenda, which is good. The Public Accounts Committee does valuable work, but a specialist committee looking specifically at infrastructure delivery could really deepen Parliament’s expertise.

Whether that’s a new full committee or a sub-committee of an existing one is a political question – some people will say there are already too many committees. But if you’re going to announce large numbers of major projects, it’s only sensible to have robust, expert scrutiny of how they’re being delivered.

Politics, history and public expectations

Joshua Wells: Is it fair to say we’ve been running big public projects since at least the 18th century and we’re still working out how to get the politics right?

Andrew Baldwin: Absolutely. There’s a book by the architect Catherine Flinn on Rebuilding Britain’s blitzed cities after the Second World War. It’s a fascinating case study.

Labour came in in 1945 and created the NHS and a lot of other major reforms. But when it came to physically rebuilding cities – clearing rubble, restoring normality – the politics and the practicalities didn’t line up. Progress was slow, resources were limited, and by the time people went to the polling station, in 1950, they were still walking past bomb sites.

You can have all the policies and promises you like, but if the projects underneath them don’t land, the public notices. That’s as true now as it was then. When I hear modern promises about building over a million homes, I can’t help thinking of 1945 and what happens when delivery doesn’t match expectation.

In the end, that’s what this report – and APM’s wider public policy work – is about. You can have all the projects you want on paper, but if you don’t do them properly, people notice.

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