Outcomes
Curzon delivered a comprehensive 10-year modernisation plan, providing the client with two major strategic options and four enhancement proposals for evaluation — each appraised through both a financial and a people-centred lens. The analysis included a best-estimate capital requirement of approximately £4 billion over the decade, a clear demonstration of the deteriorating trajectory of the estate if action was delayed, and a detailed sentiment analysis mapping where senior stakeholders aligned and — critically — where they diverged. The findings gave the client the evidence base it needed to take hard choices forward into a formal Business Case exercise.
Background
The training estate had become a significant liability. Ageing facilities were maintenance-intensive, operationally suboptimal, and in many cases no longer suited to the training requirements they were built to support. The cost and complexity of maintaining the existing footprint was accelerating, yet the path forward was far from straightforward — the estate carried deep institutional significance, and any rationalisation would need to navigate a large and diverse community of senior stakeholders with strongly held and often divergent views.
Previous attempts to address the issue had stalled. What was needed was an honest, rigorous, and independent assessment — one that could surface the hard choices clearly, build a shared understanding of the situation, and set out credible options for the decade ahead.
Curzon Approach
Working in close partnership with a specialist delivery partner, Curzon conducted a comprehensive assessment of the estate — visiting ten sites and interviewing 45 senior stakeholders to build a grounded, evidence-based picture of the challenge. The breadth of stakeholder engagement was deliberate: understanding where consensus existed — and where it did not — proved to be as valuable an output as the financial analysis itself.
Throughout the engagement, Curzon maintained a people-centred analytical lens. In a training environment, decisions about sites and facilities are inseparable from questions about people, culture, and operational effectiveness — and our recommendations reflected that. Options were developed and presented honestly, including the difficult trade-offs, rather than being softened to avoid hard conversations.
The final output laid out a structured 10-year roadmap, two primary rationalisation options, and four enhancement proposals — giving the client a clear framework for the Business Case process that would follow.
