The UK construction industry spends £1.2 billion every year investigating what’s beneath project sites. Ground investigation firms drill boreholes, analyze soil samples, and document geological conditions before a single foundation gets poured.
Yet unforeseen ground conditions still cause £120 million in annual delays and cost overruns.
Consider London’s Crossrail project, where unexpected ground conditions contributed to delays that pushed costs £4 billion over budget. Or the countless smaller projects where discovering Victorian foundations, contaminated soil, or unstable substrata mid-construction triggers emergency redesigns and schedule chaos.
That’s 10 percent of project costs evaporating because collected data doesn’t prevent the problems it’s supposed to catch. The British Geological Survey has secured government funding to address this disconnect through its Common Ground project—treating the real problem as data utilization failure, not insufficient collection.
The Industry’s Data Blindness Problem
Construction projects worldwide are hemorrhaging money from ground condition surprises. Claims on 384 transportation projects tracked in 2024 cost an average of $324 million per project, while timelines overran by 70 percent. Unforeseen physical conditions ranked as the second most common cause.
The UK’s £120 million loss follows a global pattern.
Research shows that unforeseen site conditions contribute to schedule delays in approximately 20-25 percent of projects. Subsurface surprises—unstable soil, buried utilities, contamination—halt construction until reengineering and new approvals are completed. The risk often stems from insufficient preliminary surveys when geotechnical studies are rushed or underestimated.
But here’s what makes the UK situation revealing: the industry isn’t skimping on ground investigation. The £1.2 billion annual investment demonstrates a serious commitment to understanding subsurface conditions.
The money gets spent. The data gets collected. Surprises still happen.
Where £1.2 Billion in Data Goes to Die
Ground investigation firms complete their work, deliver reports to clients, and file the data. That information typically lives in project-specific silos—accessible to the team that commissioned it, invisible to everyone else.
When a new project launches three blocks away, the process starts from scratch.
Fresh boreholes get drilled. New soil samples get analyzed. Geological knowledge gathered months or years earlier sits unused in filing cabinets and hard drives. The industry treats each site as unknown despite sitting on decades of accumulated subsurface intelligence.
This fragmentation creates an inefficiency: the construction sector continuously pays to rediscover what it already knows.
The BGS National Geotechnical Properties Database contains validated data from 200,000 boreholes across the UK. This represents decades of ground investigation work, consolidated and verified by geological experts. The database exists, but the industry has lacked practical mechanisms to integrate this information into project planning workflows.
The Common Ground project aims to close that gap.
The Endemic Delay Problem
Ground condition surprises operate within a broader context of endemic project delays. A Project Management Institute survey revealed that 72 percent of participants often or always experience project delays, while 73 percent stated that projects often go over budget.
Over 87 percent of construction projects experience a delay or cost overrun of some duration.
Inefficiency has become the norm. This normalization creates complacency where preventable problems get absorbed as inevitable friction. Teams build contingency into schedules and budgets to accommodate expected surprises rather than eliminating root causes.
Ground condition issues stand out because they’re both common and preventable. Unlike weather delays or supply chain disruptions, subsurface conditions don’t change. The soil composition beneath a site in 2025 matches what existed in 2020.
It just doesn’t flow to the people who need it.
Why Geotechnical Data Remains Trapped
The construction industry’s digital transformation lags behind other sectors. While digital twin technology and machine learning show promise, their application faces obstacles.
Research on geotechnical engineering’s digital evolution reveals a constraint: “Development and application of machine learning are relatively slow in geotechnical practice, because extensive training databases are a key to the success of machine learning, but geotechnical data are often small and ugly.”
Translation: the data exists in formats that resist analysis.
Different firms use different documentation standards. Borehole logs vary in detail and terminology. Soil classification systems lack consistency. The information contained in geotechnical investigations “cannot be well integrated because of the lack of unified data standards,” creating challenges for multidisciplinary coordination.
This fragmentation isn’t just a technical inconvenience. It prevents the industry from building comprehensive datasets that would enable predictive analysis, pattern recognition, and risk reduction.
The BGS approach addresses this through validation and standardization. By consolidating data from 200,000 boreholes into a consistent format with expert verification, the National Geotechnical Properties Database creates the foundation for useful analysis.
From Glasgow Pilot to National Infrastructure
The Common Ground project started with a focused pilot in Glasgow. This geographic constraint served a strategic purpose: testing tools and workflows in a defined area before attempting national-scale deployment.
Pilots reveal what works and what doesn’t without the consequences of large-scale failure.
The Glasgow implementation validated the core concept—that centralized, accessible geotechnical data could inform project planning in practical ways. It also surfaced user experience requirements that wouldn’t have emerged from theoretical design.
BGS partnered with Difference Engine for market research and strategy development, prioritizing end-user functionality. This collaboration recognizes what many data initiatives miss: authoritative data only delivers value when designed around actual user workflows and decision-making processes.
Engineers and project managers don’t need raw data dumps. They need answers to questions: What soil conditions should we expect at this depth? How do nearby sites compare? What foundation approaches have worked in similar geology?
The expanded funding enables BGS to scale the pilot learnings into a national geotechnical data service. This represents a shift from proof-of-concept to operational infrastructure.
The Government’s Role in Market Failures
The Government Office for Technology Transfer funding reveals a dynamic in construction innovation. Individual companies can’t justify building shared infrastructure that benefits competitors. The collective value exceeds any single organization’s incentive to invest.
This creates a market failure where socially beneficial infrastructure doesn’t get built.
Government intervention makes economic sense when it unlocks private sector efficiency gains that markets won’t spontaneously generate. The Common Ground project fits this model—creating a public good that enables industry-wide improvement.
The initiative also signals policy recognition that construction innovation requires different support mechanisms than software or manufacturing. Unlike sectors where companies can capture returns from innovation investment, construction improvements often depend on shared knowledge infrastructure.
Ground investigation data becomes more valuable as it accumulates and connects. A single borehole provides limited insight. Thousands of boreholes across a region reveal geological patterns, identify risk zones, and enable predictive modeling.
No individual firm benefits enough from contributing data to justify the effort. But the collective benefit of pooled, validated geotechnical information could transform project planning.
The Carbon Dimension Nobody Discusses
The Common Ground project mentions carbon emission reduction alongside efficiency gains. This connection deserves attention.
Construction rework generates substantial emissions. When ground condition surprises, force design changes, and materials get wasted. Equipment runs longer than planned. Supply chains activate twice for the same work.
Data-driven project planning that prevents rework represents a less visible but significant emissions reduction pathway compared to more prominent decarbonization strategies.
The construction sector’s climate impact extends beyond operational energy use and embodied carbon in materials. The inefficiency tax—the extra emissions from doing work twice, moving equipment unnecessarily, and disposing of materials that didn’t fit revised designs—rarely appears in carbon accounting.
Better geotechnical data won’t solve construction’s climate challenge. But it addresses one source of avoidable emissions that compounds across thousands of projects.
What Success Looks Like
The Common Ground project aims to maximize return on ground investigation investment, reduce project risk, increase efficiency, and support a more resilient construction industry.
Measuring success requires tracking whether the £120 million in annual losses from unforeseen ground conditions decreases. This metric provides a clear baseline and target.
But the deeper impact involves changing how the industry thinks about geological knowledge. Ground investigation currently functions as project-specific insurance—you buy it, use it once, and file it away. The shift toward treating geotechnical data as cumulative national infrastructure would represent a change in industry practice.
Projects would start with existing knowledge rather than from scratch. Ground investigation work would build on previous findings rather than duplicate them. The £1.2 billion annual investment would compound rather than reset with each new project.
This model could extend beyond geotechnical data. Construction faces similar fragmentation in other domains where individual actors generate valuable information but lack mechanisms for collective learning.
The template matters as much as the specific application.
Why “Authoritative” Matters
BGS positions itself as providing “authoritative” data services. This language hints at quality and verification challenges in current ground investigation practices.
Not all geotechnical data carries equal reliability. Investigation methodology varies. Documentation completeness differs. Interpretation quality fluctuates based on the firm and the individuals involved.
When you’re planning a £50 million project, you need confidence in the subsurface information guiding foundation design. Data of uncertain provenance or inconsistent quality creates risk rather than reducing it.
BGS brings geological expertise and quality assurance processes that individual project teams can’t replicate. The validation work that goes into the National Geotechnical Properties Database transforms raw investigation data into trustworthy intelligence.
This authority function may prove as valuable as the data aggregation itself. The construction industry needs more than information access—it needs confidence that the information is correct.
The Real Test Ahead
The Common Ground expansion faces a challenge that technical solutions often underestimate: changing workflows.
Engineers and project managers operate under time pressure with familiar processes. Adopting new data sources requires learning new interfaces, trusting unfamiliar information, and adjusting planning routines that work well enough.
“Well enough” is the enemy of better.
Annual losses from ground condition surprises get distributed across thousands of projects. Most teams experience manageable impacts that don’t justify process overhauls. The collective inefficiency is massive, but individual pain points feel tolerable.
Success depends on making the national geotechnical data service more convenient than current practices. If accessing validated subsurface information requires extra steps or unfamiliar tools, adoption will stall.
The Difference Engine partnership and user-centric design focus suggest BGS understands this dynamic. The question is whether the implementation delivers on the insight.
Beyond Ground Conditions
The construction industry’s data fragmentation extends beyond geotechnical information. Project performance data, material specifications, contractor reliability, design solutions, and lessons learned all exist in isolated pockets rather than flowing into collective knowledge systems.
If the Common Ground project succeeds, it will establish a template for addressing these parallel challenges. The model—government-funded shared infrastructure, expert validation, user-centric design, pilot testing before scaling—could apply to other construction data domains.
Healthcare, agriculture, and infrastructure maintenance face analogous problems where distributed knowledge fails to aggregate into actionable intelligence. The mechanisms that enable geotechnical data sharing might translate to these sectors with appropriate adaptation.
The broader implication involves recognizing that certain types of knowledge create more value when shared than when siloed. This runs counter to competitive instincts where information equals advantage.
But ground conditions don’t change based on who discovers them. The soil beneath a site has the same properties whether investigated by Firm A or Firm B. Competition based on rediscovering identical geological facts wastes resources.
The value shifts to what you do with reliable information, not who collects it first.
The £120 Million Question Revisited
Why does the UK construction industry still hit underground surprises despite spending £1.2 billion annually on ground investigation?
Because data collection doesn’t equal utilization. Because individual project focus prevents cumulative learning. Because the industry lacks infrastructure to transform isolated investigations into collective intelligence.
The Common Ground project addresses these root causes rather than treating symptoms. The expanded funding enables scaling a proven approach from pilot to national service.
Whether it succeeds depends on execution details that won’t be visible until the service launches and teams start using it in project planning. The technical foundation exists. The policy support is in place. The market need is quantified.
The test is whether the industry adopts tools that challenge established practices, even when those tools promise to prevent £120 million in annual losses.
That’s the real question. And if the answer remains “no,” the industry will keep paying £120 million annually to relearn what it already knows—one avoidable surprise at a time.