This Week at Curzon: Delivering on Strategic Ambitions
1st June 2025
As the UK faces complex challenges in defence, energy, and public sector reform, the spotlight turns not just to policy, but to delivery. This week, the Curzon Consulting team shared critical insights on the enablers and barriers to achieving national goals.
Here’s your weekly roundup:
Defence & Strategic Delivery
Can We Build Fast Enough to Deliver Defence Ambitions?
The government has committed to a generational uplift in defence investment. But as Gregory Stojakovic and Virginia Arguelles point out, the key question isn’t about money, it’s about execution.
Delivery capability, supply chain readiness, and programme discipline are now the real battlegrounds. Without reforms that drive productivity and remove bottlenecks, record funding risks falling short of the intended impact.
📌 Insight: Unlocking value in defence demands more than funding; it requires agile delivery and strategic project leadership.
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Procurement Reform & ESG Impact

Procurement Legislation Is Reshaping NGO-Business Partnerships
James Edsberg explains how recent reforms to UK procurement law are creating a shift in the way public sector and NGO partnerships operate. Under the new legislation, suppliers must show serious intent around Net-Zero targets and broader ESG goals.
This is catalysing internal change across organisations—raising the bar on transparency, accountability, and social value integration in public contracts.
📌 Insight: ESG is no longer a ‘nice to have’ it’s becoming a core contract requirement, and businesses must adapt fast.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7333394118015946753
Nuclear Infrastructure & Productivity
Why Nuclear Projects Struggle—and How We Can Fix It
As the UK looks to nuclear energy to strengthen energy security and meet climate goals, Andrew Wilson explains why delivery remains a stumbling block. Chronic delays and budget overruns are often caused not by technical complexity, but by governance and management breakdowns.
Drawing on infrastructure programme experience, he calls for stronger leadership, smarter supply chain strategies, and long-term project discipline to restore trust in major capital projects.
📌 Insight: Productivity and predictability, not just innovation will determine the success of the UK’s nuclear ambitions.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7333756511631929344
💬 Final Thought
This week’s updates reflect a growing consensus: turning strategy into results demands systemic change. Whether it’s defence, procurement, or energy infrastructure, our focus remains on helping clients remove friction, unlock capability, and deliver measurable impact.
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Driving Strategic Impact: A Curzon Consulting Guide to Procurement Excellence
As management consultants, we help clients achieve substantial cost savings and efficiencies through procurement transformations. But truly effective transformations require surmounting common challenges like limited spend visibility and stakeholder alignment.
Based on a recent engagement delivering over £5M in savings, here are our proven tips for procurement transformation success:
Optimise spend visibility
Robust spend analysis is crucial. Categorise expenditures and pinpoint top suppliers and contracts per category. Without clean baseline data, it’s impossible to identify savings levers. Advanced analytics and mining uncover hidden insights, while stakeholder interviews provide a qualitative context.
Benchmark and identify gaps
Benchmark pricing and performance versus industry best practices to reveal overpayment. Consolidate volumes for improved leverage. Deep supply market analysis uncovers alternative vendors and guides negotiations.
Strategise and priortise
Conduct opportunity assessments to inform transformation planning. Develop tailored category-specific sourcing strategies. Model potential savings scenarios and sequence initiatives based on impact, effort, and stakeholder readiness.
Secure stakeholder alignment
Amidst change, align stakeholders through clear communication and early buy-in. Identify key decision-makers and influencers. Educate on best practices and projected bottom-line impact. Procurement must shed its tactical image and be seen as a strategic function driving millions in bottom-line impact.
Relentlessly implement
With the strategy set, focus intensely on implementation. Maintain discipline in negotiations while preserving supplier relationships. Enforce contract compliance and tail spend management.
Continuously improve
Sustaining change requires continuous improvement. Redesign operating models, policies, KPIs, training, and integrate new tech and ways of working. Build analytics to monitor savings and flag waste recurrence. Institutionalising change is the hallmark of procurement leaders.
After meeting our cost-savings goals, we leveraged our award-winning assessment framework to ensure the procurement organisation’s long-term success. Our framework evaluates Procurement across five dimensions: People, Strategy, Systems, Governance, and Management. This data-driven approach identified gaps and enabled us to strategise implementing best practices. Ultimately, these steps addressed challenges, so the procurement organisation can expand its influence and be viewed as a strategic partner across all business units.

In conclusion
As trusted consultants, we overcome inertia and silos to deliver rapid yet lasting transformation. With deep expertise and cross-industry perspective, we objectively assess opportunities, align stakeholders, and implement best practices. The result is simplified sourcing, lower costs, reduced risks, increased efficiency, and strategic impact.
Let us conduct an initial diagnostic for your procurement organisation. We will benchmark performance, identify savings levers, and provide a roadmap to deliver value.
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Chairman's Masterclass: "Leadership and Legacy"
Event: "Leadership and Legacy"11 October 2018
On 11 October 2018 we are joined by Paul Dreschler, CBI President and Chairman of Bibby Line Group.
Paul will share his views on the role that business and business leaders have in shaping the future of Great Britain.
The Unbankable Sector of Outsourcing is the latest event in our Chairman’s Masterclass Dinner series, providing UK business leaders with insight for over a decade.
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