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The Big Short

Written by Triplevalueimpact

Insights

February 15, 2026

NISTA’s latest Major Projects Annual Report has just rated the UK’s 189 largest government programmes, a £924.2 billion portfolio expected to deliver £603.6 billion in benefits. Of those 189, only 29, 15%, are rated green, meaning delivery confidence is high with no major issues in sight. 58% are amber. 18% are red. If you sat on the delivery side of any one of them, none of that would surprise you. What’s worth paying attention to is what moved this year, and what it says about where the fix actually lives.

The number that matters more than the snapshot

Twenty-six projects successfully exited the portfolio this year, up from 14 the year before, and 18 projects moved from amber to green. One even moved from red all the way to green. A single-year rating is a snapshot of where a programme happens to be standing. A move from amber to green is evidence that something was actually donedifferently, and eighteen instances of that in one year is not noise.

Where the improvement actually happened

Seventy per cent of this year’s exits came from Government Transformation and Service Delivery projects, the category built around digital and process change rather than physical construction. That’s notable. These are exactly the programmes where the difference between amber and green usually comes down to the unglamorous basics: clear governance, realistic planning and sequencing, and someone operationally accountable for the link between change activity and outcome. Infrastructure and Construction remains the largest category by cost at £450 billion, and Military Capability the largest by scale of ambition, but it’s the transformation programmes that show what disciplined delivery does when it’s applied properly.

Why the amber majority is the real story

58% amber is not a crisis rating, and it shouldn’t be read as one. It’s the holding pattern most complex programmes sit in for long stretches (and I speak from personal experience), dependent on decisions, funding profiles or delivery risks that haven’t yet resolved either way. The real question a 58% amber figure raises isn’t “why aren’t these programmes green,” it’s “what determines whether an amber programme moves toward green or drifts toward red.” This year’s data gives a partial answer: the programmes that moved were disproportionately the ones where delivery discipline, not just funding or ambition, was strengthened. Amber itself is not the problem; amber without a clear route to green can become a permanent condition.

 

What this means if you’re running one of these programmes

If your programme sits in the amber 58%, the lesson from this year’s movers is specific rather than general. It isn’t “get more funding” or “set a more ambitious target,” both of which were almost certainly already true. It’s the operational layer underneath: whether governance is clear enough that decisions get made at the right level, whether sequencing reflects what the delivery team can actually absorb, and whether someone owns the connection between what’s being delivered and the benefit it was meant to produce. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury put it plainly this year: building things in the UK has felt too difficult, too expensive, too complicated, too slow. The 26 exits and 18 upgrades are the evidence that this is fixable at the level of individual programmes, not just at the level of national strategy.

Where TVI fits in

This is the layer we work in every day: embedding with client teams to bring the governance, sequencing and delivery discipline that moves a programme from amber toward green, and staying close enough to the detail that “on track” means something more than a status update. If your organisation is running a digital programme that’sbeen sitting in amber longer than it should, that’s a conversation worth having now, while there’s still time to change the trajectory.

Get in touch with Triple Value Impact to talk about what it would take to move your programme toward green.

What DCSs can learn from Steve Carell and “The Big Short”
The financial backdrop to the 2008 crisis and the rising SEN debts looks remarkably similar – and may offer lessons

The challenges of SEN will be familiar to anyone working in children’s services – demand has doubled in 8 years, Councils, Children and Families are set-up for conflict within a combative legal system that rewards families with resources to challenge and underrepresents children without advocates to speak for them. Local Authorities have largely been left to attempt to absorb the challenge alone, at a time where cost pressures across all council departments are stark.

Wall Street Traders and Directors of Children’s services may have fundamentally different values and goals, yet the underlying challenge is remarkably similar - how to deploy resources in the context of wider system failings. This is not just a question of resources, it’s a question of perverse incentives, short-term financial sticky tape and ultimately – poor outcomes for recipients of the services. Whereas Steve Carell’s character was concerned with jobs, pensions and the lives of “ordinary people”, DCSs must consider the impact to the most vulnerable people in society; children of families with complex needs.

Just as reckless financial innovation led estate agents to issue the risky NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, no Assets) that collapsed the financial system, councils are forced to use the “Statutory Override”, which hides SEN debts off council balance sheets.  SEN provision drives High Needs Block (HNB) costs, which are legally held off the books by being markedas “allocated reserves” by accountants. While this enables councils to maintain spending levels on other services – it hides the growing problem.

In reality, this “unallocated reserve” has already been spent. If the council doesn’t have the cash to fund the spending, it must borrow, which incurs interest payments. Last year alone, Norfolk council spent £7m last year on the interest payments for it’s HNB debts. The announcement that 90% of outstanding debt will be paid off by the government is positiveand solves the short-term financial challenge – but does nothing to address the underlying budgetary pressure.

So what can be done?

Here perhaps, Steve Carell can help. If the system is not functioning, skip the noise and speak to those on the frontline of the services. The defining moment of Steve’s journey in The Big Short comes when speaking to an exotic dancer, discussing her two mortgages on her one house. As the story unfolds it is revealed she owns 5 houses… and a condo.

It was this insight that enables Steve to place his “Big Short” – cutting through system noise and considering what is fundamentally happening in the system. For Steve, it was housing debt. For DCSs, it’s effectively and efficiently identifying and preventing escalations in the needs of vulnerable children.

Early indications suggest the white paper will remove the binary EHCP / No-EHCP outcome for students and create a 4-tier system based on scaled levels of need. This will change how demand is managed, but won’t change the fundamentals we are seeing on the ground in councils across the UK:

• Administration consumes limited specialist resources (such as SENCOs and EPs)
• Assessment and Early Help data is unclear, subjective and does not identify escalating needs early enough
• Interventions rely on scare specialist 1:1 provision that arrives too late (The average wait to start CAMHS services is 392 days)
• Costly private providers will continue to capitalise on their market power
• Parents feel combative and at-odds with councils, increasing the costs of managing complaint costs (such as tribunals)

Cost-effective digital tools drive human-centric conversations and address underlying service pressures right now.

➢ Specialist resources overwhelmed by manual administration? - Deploy gen-AI to automate key administrative tasks, such as first draft EHCPs and Care Act Assessments
➢ Private provision driving up costs with no way to hold providers accountable? –Aggregate school attendance data to maximise internal special school placement utilisation and deploy national pricing methodology to baseline care costs
➢ Outdated and subjective data used to allocate high-cost, limited resources? – Deploy clinically-proven, engaging and low-cost digital tools to support children and their families to manage their emotions and develop their speech, language and communication skills

Just as in “The Big Short”, addressing the challenges faced by Children’s services will require a combination of creativity, collaboration and a deep understanding of what really drives system pressure.

Come and join the conversation.

TVI supports councils to cut through the system noise and meaningfully invest in low cost, early help initiatives that improve outcomes for children and young people and create a sustainable financial platform. If you’d like to discuss some of the proposed solutions in this article further, please contact henry.stgeorge@triplevalueimpact.com

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