Perfect infrastructure clients: key lessons from senior leaders for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Senior leaders from UK infrastructure contractors and consultants describe “perfect clients” as those who give early clarity on scope, risk allocation and budget, rather than driving lowest-price tenders under tight OPEX and CAPEX constraints. They point to clients who lock in requirements before RIBA Stage 3, share digital models and ground investigation data, and commit to NEC-style collaborative contracts as enabling better programme certainty and fewer design changes. For engineers, this behaviour supports realistic geotechnical risk pricing, leaner design iterations and more reliable whole-life asset performance.
Technical Brief
- Framework-style, multi-project relationships are preferred, enabling standardised specifications and repeatable design solutions.
Our Take
Within the 42 Infrastructure stories in our database, the ‘Projects’ tag is often associated with delivery risk, procurement route and client governance, so senior leaders’ views on a ‘perfect client’ will likely feed directly into how frameworks and NEC-style contracts are being structured in practice.
New Civil Engineer appears frequently in our 102 tag-matched pieces as a platform for contractor and consultant perspectives, which suggests this article may be read by clients as informal guidance on behaviours that actually influence bid appetite and pricing on UK infrastructure schemes.
Across recent Infrastructure coverage, articles that touch on client capability and behaviours are commonly linked to programme overruns and dispute levels, implying that the traits described here are not just ‘soft skills’ but key levers for reducing claims and improving whole-life project outcomes.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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