A stalled national procurement, recovered in four months.

A national biosecurity procurement at Defra had stopped moving, four months out from EU exit. The deadline was not the department’s to move: the capability had to be contracted and standing on the day the UK left, or a statutory function would have had nothing behind it.

This is the ordinary shape of a stalled programme. Not one catastrophic failure. A supplier negotiation that had not concluded, a legal question nobody owned, and a delivery date that had been restated three times without being rebuilt underneath — on a programme whose consequences were being read at ministerial level.

We took hold of it. That meant separating what had been delivered from what had been reported, then rebuilding the three things the department had lost: a plan that reflected the real dependencies, a board with the authority to clear them, and reporting nobody had to decode.

Alongside the procurement itself we managed roughly £4m of commissioning and the drafting of the statutory instruments the new arrangement depended on. The legal underpinning and the commercial one had to arrive together, or neither counted. Progress was reported directly to ministers and to the Cabinet Office.

The work was not analytical. It was operational. We ran it alongside the department’s own people rather than producing findings for someone else to act on.

Four months from arrival, the procurement was recovered and back to a position the department could defend: to its own ministers, to the centre of government, and against a deadline set by the UK’s exit from the European Union rather than by Defra.

What stayed behind was the plan, the governance and a reporting rhythm the department could run without us. A recovery that leaves a dependency has not finished.