Sellafield is the UK’s most complex nuclear site, with the largest inventory of untreated waste in the world.
Sellafield Ltd – on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority – is delivering a 100-year programme to create a clean and safe environment for future generations, while helping government to achieve its net zero objectives. Investing £1.7 billion in our supply chain in 2023/24, 35 per cent of it with small to medium-sized enterprises, Sellafield Ltd is supporting more than 43,000 jobs across the UK, generating valuable skills and economic impact.
The company has reached a breakthrough moment in its 70-year history, by bringing multiple companies into one team to deliver a multi-billion pound portfolio of major infrastructure, turning the tide on their project performance.
Our new approach crosses organisations, industries and regions, with collaboration at a level never seen before at the 6 square kilometre nuclear site in Cumbria.
Sellafield’s investment in partnerships spans multiple decades. This includes the development and mobilisation of a fundamentally different commercial model to deliver all future major capital projects over 20 years – the Programme and Project Partners strategy (PPP).
Our aim has not only been to improve our project performance but also help enhance UK infrastructure and our communities, requiring bold steps for an industry that is naturally risk-averse.
Inspired by so-called Project 13 strategies, and the government’s Construction Playbook, our PPP model implements a single collaborative major projects team that unites Sellafield Ltd with four best-in-class organisations covering the full project delivery lifecycle.
The PPP partnership brings together KBR, Amentum, Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, Altrad Babcock and Sellafield Ltd as one team, to deliver a 20-year pipeline of major infrastructure projects. Multiple independent assessments by the Infrastructure Projects Authority suggest that project delivery is moving in the right direction.
It has now been five years since we formed this long-term partnership. Since then we have been leading, learning and maturing this new approach to how we deliver projects.
One of the first things we did was establish the Health, Safety and Wellbeing Hub with 16 organisations who deliver 85 per cent of the hours worked, to identify and deliver best practice from across the industry. It has transformed our safe working culture and gives us a collective accountability for keeping our people from harm. As well as bringing in PPP, we set specific goals based upon safety, skills, robust estimating, multi-project procurement and collaborative behaviours. After five years of maturing and collaborating we are now able to describe how we are operating as one diverse and effective project delivery team.
Historically, Sellafield Ltd delivered complex major projects through traditional models, engaging the supply chain to engineer, procure and construct on a project-by-project basis. In Autumn 2024, the National Audit Office’s report on Sellafield recognised a shift in project performance at the site, and while there is still work to do, this marks a true turn in the tide in the site’s history of project delivery.
In fact, the company is now firmly establishing itself as a leader in infrastructure delivery, with one of the UK’s busiest construction hubs, creating new-build facilities that will allow the emptying of legacy waste stores by safely treating and storing radioactive material for decades to come.
We are responsible for creating a clean and safe environment for future generations at Sellafield, which means safely reducing the UK’s hazards. That remains our number one priority. Some of the criticism we have received in the past relating to our project performance was tough, but fair, and we knew it would take a radical change not just to our approach, but to the mindset of our workforce, our stakeholders and other infrastructure programmes. To move us towards more predictable project performance, we judged that we would need one team collaborating over a sustained period with a common set of values and behaviours.
Safety is at the heart of this collaborative approach. If we’re not using our collective experiences to keep our people safe, then we’ll have failed. Across our business, and indeed across the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority group, we offer the opportunity to work on challenging, complex, and often first-of-a-kind projects, which require problem-solving skills, the ability to think differently, and use tried-and-tested methods or equipment in different situations.
Our 12,000 strong workforce is joined by a diverse supply chain, from small businesses to global market leaders. We need this diversity of thinking, of backgrounds, cultures and experiences to succeed. With many years of work left on our plan, there is a real opportunity to make a difference by solving challenges and provide expertise across the nuclear sector and beyond.
A few years before we formed PPP, we knew we needed to be proactive in the UK skills agenda, so we collaborated with industry bodies and universities to pioneer a new Project Academy and bespoke project management degree apprenticeship.
As part of our new PPP approach, we have initiated policies that have had a range of measurable, positive outcomes that have created multipliers across the local community and the region. We have deliberately designed matrix delivery teams where people can move around the programme for the next 20 years – underpinned by a culture that promotes collaboration. We have embedded a multi-project procurement model and early contractor involvement practices so that matrix project delivery teams are set up from the very start of the lifecycle.
I’d like to say the job is done, and that we’re genuinely worlds apart from where we were 12 years ago, but there is still so much to do, and we must keep working.
One of the most important things we can do is continue to share lessons with others. The infrastructure client group (ICG) brings together government and industry to collaborate on major project delivery schemes. Sellafield now sits as chair on the ICG’s Project 13 Adopter Group. That’s something we’re proud of, and which allows us to facilitate learning across the largest infrastructure programmes in the UK.
It is now for us to continue to mature and harness this mix of skills, diversity of thinking, backgrounds, cultures, and experiences to make us one of the most exciting portfolios in the country, helping to make Sellafield a truly great place to work.
Related
