IN Brief:
- The CMA has called for reform of public road and rail procurement after identifying persistent cost and delivery problems.
- The watchdog says better pipelines, standardisation, and procurement consistency could unlock major efficiency gains.
- The findings add pressure on government to address how public infrastructure work is scoped, funded, and bought.
The Competition and Markets Authority has called for a major overhaul of how public road and rail civil engineering work is procured, warning that fragmented buying, inconsistent procurement, and short-term funding are weakening the market.
The watchdog’s final civil engineering market study focuses on publicly funded road and railway infrastructure, excluding HS2. It identifies a procurement environment in which contractors and suppliers face uncertain pipelines, repeated project-by-project variation, and limited confidence to invest in skills, plant, digital systems, and delivery innovation.
Public bodies spent around £19 billion on road and rail infrastructure in 2023/24, according to the CMA, including £10.3 billion on roads and £8.7 billion on rail. That level of spending gives the public sector considerable buying power, yet the study argues that this scale has not been matched by a consistent enough approach to delivery, planning, or market engagement.
Among the watchdog’s main recommendations is a stronger strategic role for HM Treasury, rather than leaving individual clients and procuring bodies to tackle systemic problems separately. The CMA wants more credible long-term pipelines, greater use of standard designs, better project scoping, and procurement methods that reduce avoidable complexity before work reaches tender stage.
Cost pressure across civil engineering has already been visible in market data, with civil tender-price measures continuing to rise as input costs, workload mix, and risk pricing feed through into bids. Against that backdrop, procurement reform is not a procedural concern; it sits directly in the path between infrastructure ambition and deliverable work packages.
The CMA’s analysis also raises a productivity question that has followed the sector for years. Road and rail clients often buy complex assets that are highly dependent on local conditions, but repeated use of bespoke designs, inconsistent client requirements, and separate accreditation routes can make it harder for suppliers to plan work across multiple schemes. For smaller contractors and specialist suppliers, that fragmentation can turn public work into a high-cost bidding environment with limited visibility beyond the next package.
Standardisation will not remove the technical difficulty of civil engineering. Bridges, junctions, rail possessions, utilities, earthworks, drainage, public interfaces, and environmental constraints rarely fit into neat templates. Better procurement can, however, reduce the amount of energy lost to inconsistent requirements, late scope changes, duplicated approvals, and avoidable risk transfer.
The government is expected to respond within 90 days. The practical test will be whether the recommendations become a coordinated reform programme across departments, arm’s-length bodies, local authorities, and regulated infrastructure clients, or whether they remain another clear diagnosis of a system that already knows where many of its problems sit.
