The Cost of Doing Nothing: Why the Status Quo Is the One Option Nobody Prices

By Kane Lennon, Director, Local Government Property Consultants (LGPC)

Watch a difficult estate decision move through a council, and a pattern repeats itself. Every active option is interrogated. The disposal is challenged on the receipt it will raise, the political reaction it will provoke, the precedent it will set. The redevelopment is challenged on cost, risk, delivery time and planning uncertainty. The repurposing is challenged on whether the service case truly justifies the capital. Each option arrives at committee with its costs and risks laid out, and each is tested against them.

And then there is the option that arrives unexamined: continuing as we are. It carries no business case, no risk schedule, no cost line. It is not even framed as a choice - it is simply the thing that happens if no decision is taken. And precisely because it is not framed as a choice, it is never made to answer for its cost. In a process designed to scrutinise options, the status quo enjoys an extraordinary privilege: it is the one option whose bill is never read out. It is also, on an ageing or underperforming asset, frequently the option that costs the most.

This article is about taking that privilege away - because the status quo is not the absence of a decision. It is a decision, it has a cost, and on an ageing or underperforming asset it is very often the most expensive option on the table. It wins anyway, not because it is cheapest, but because its cost is the only one nobody is asked to quantify.

"Do nothing" is a decision, and the Green Book says so

This is not a matter of opinion or of consultancy framing. It is settled public-sector appraisal doctrine, and HM Treasury's Green Book - the methodology every officer's business case is ultimately measured against - could hardly be clearer about it.

The Green Book requires every appraisal to define a "business as usual" case: the outcome expected if current arrangements continue and no action is taken. Two things about how it treats that case are decisive. First, in its own words, "BAU does not mean doing nothing" - it "reflects the fact that continuing with current arrangements carries its own costs, benefits and risks." The status quo is modelled as an active path with consequences, not as a neutral resting state. Second, the business-as-usual case "should be taken through to shortlist appraisal regardless of whether or not it meets the objectives." It is not optional. An appraisal that fails to cost the do-nothing path is not taking a sensible shortcut; it is departing from the standard against which the decision will later be judged.

That second point deserves weight, because it changes the character of the omission. When an authority compares its active options against each other but never properly prices continuation, the gap is not a presentational quirk. It is a hole in the appraisal at exactly the point the methodology treats as mandatory - the benchmark against which everything else is supposed to be measured. That matters not only as a question of method but of defensibility: a decision taken without a properly costed baseline is harder to evidence, harder to defend on review, and more exposed to challenge - whether from auditors, from members, or from the simple passage of time that reveals what the unpriced option actually cost.

How the status quo escapes scrutiny

If the doctrine is this clear, why does inaction so reliably escape the costing? The answer is partly structural and partly psychological, and it is worth understanding both, because they are what an officer is up against.

Structurally, the costs of continuation are diffuse and deferred, while the costs of action are concentrated and immediate. A disposal or a redevelopment has a price tag, a date, and a name attached to the decision. Continuation has none of these: its costs arrive slowly, spread across future years' revenue accounts and a capital programme that has not yet been written, carried by officers and members who may not be the ones taking today's decision. A cost that lands all at once, on an identifiable desk, is scrutinised. A cost that seeps out over a decade, across many desks, is absorbed. The two may be identical in total, but only one of them feels like a decision.

The Green Book names the technical version of this trap directly. It warns practitioners against "normalising BAU to zero" - presenting every option as a difference from the status quo rather than in absolute terms - precisely because zeroing the baseline makes its real cost vanish from view. Once continuation is treated as the neutral point from which everything else is a deviation, its own substantial cost stops being visible as a cost at all. It becomes the background against which other things are expensive, rather than a thing that is itself expensive.

Psychologically, inaction feels safer because its failure mode is quieter. A decision that goes wrong is attributable; a slow deterioration that was nobody's explicit choice is not. The official who commissions a disposal that underperforms can be asked why; the official who lets an ageing asset drift toward a regulatory deadline is rarely asked the equivalent question, even where the eventual cost is far greater. Absent a deliberate counterweight, the incentive runs toward the option that defers blame rather than the one that delivers value.

What a properly costed status quo contains

Costing continuation honestly is not difficult in principle; it is simply rarely done in full. On an ageing operational asset, a complete business-as-usual position generally contains four components, and the error is almost always one of omission rather than calculation:

• The revenue position - the net annual cost of continuing to operate, projected across a realistic horizon rather than a single year.

• The maintenance liability - the backlog and lifecycle works the asset will require simply to remain serviceable, which an out-of-date condition survey routinely understates.

• The regulatory liability - the cost of bringing the asset to whatever compliance standard the published trajectory will require, which continuation defers but does not avoid.

• The opportunity cost - the capital and management attention tied up in the asset, unavailable to the parts of the estate that genuinely serve future need. This is the component most often missing entirely.

This reflects established asset-management practice rather than any novel test. The RICS framework for strategic public sector property asset management defines the discipline as aligning property assets with the strategic aims of the organisation across their whole life - "through acquisition, operation and management to disposal" - rather than assessing costs in isolation or treating retention as the default. Read against that standard, the cost of continuation is not the annual running figure alone; it is all four components considered as a single whole-life position. Leaving any one of them out does not make it cheaper. It makes it unseen.

Summed across a realistic horizon, these four routinely produce a figure that dwarfs the receipt or saving available from acting - and that is the number the status quo has been escaping. It is not a hypothetical. It is the actual, cumulative cost of the path the authority is on, and it is no less real for being unwritten. It is not unusual to see an ageing operational asset carrying a seven-figure forward liability continue in use year after year, while a disposal that would raise only a modest six-figure receipt is set aside as insufficiently attractive - a comparison that looks entirely different once the true cost of the first option is on the page beside the second.

Nor is it a marginal concern. The scale of unpriced liability sitting in the public estate is now a matter of record: the National Audit Office estimated in January 2025 that the maintenance backlog across the central government estate stands at at least £49 billion, with poor condition data meaning the true figure is likely higher, and it noted that deferring maintenance can significantly increase the eventual cost of putting it right. That backlog is, in effect, the cumulative result of liabilities deferred rather than resolved: what appears as a backlog at national level is simply the accumulation of decisions in which the cost of doing nothing was never fully priced at the point it mattered. The same dynamic operates on a single asset as on a national estate: a liability that is never priced is not a liability that is absent, only one that has yet to be counted - and one that, left long enough, grows. At a time when many authorities are balancing acute financial pressure against a growing burden of estate liabilities, the cost of continuation is increasingly a strategic question for the whole organisation rather than a matter for the property team alone.

The avoided cost is the argument

Once that figure exists, it reframes the entire decision - and it does so in a way that is particularly important on constrained sites, where the case for action is otherwise hard to make.

The instinct, when justifying a disposal or redevelopment, is to lead with the receipt. But on many public assets - rural, designated, access-limited, or simply small - the achievable receipt is modest, and a case resting on it alone looks underwhelming. Set against a properly costed status quo, the picture inverts. The decisive figure is no longer the money raised but the cost avoided: the future revenue subsidy, maintenance and regulatory liability that the authority stops carrying. On the kind of asset where the do-nothing cost has been allowed to accumulate unpriced, that avoided cost can exceed the realisable receipt several times over. The case for change was always there; it was simply sitting in the column nobody had filled in.

This is also why the avoided-cost framing is more honest, not less, than leading with the receipt. It does not oversell the transaction or promise a windfall. It states plainly what the authority ceases to spend, and lets that stand against what it is giving up. For a finance audience, it is the more credible argument precisely because it is the more conservative one. And in practice, when an authority takes the time to quantify the continuation cost in full, the balance of the decision often shifts materially - not because the analysis is weighted toward action, but because one side of the ledger was simply never filled in before.

A word on fairness

None of this is a licence to load the status quo with every imaginable cost in order to make action look inevitable. The Green Book is explicit on this too, and the discipline cuts both ways: overstating the costs and risks of business as usual makes intervention appear unduly attractive, while understating them makes it appear unduly unattractive. A business-as-usual case built to lose is as much a failure of appraisal as one that was never built at all.

The goal is not to make continuation look bad. It is to make it visible - to give it the same honest accounting every active option already receives, so that the comparison is fair in both directions. Sometimes a properly costed status quo turns out to be a viable, if imperfect, way forward, and the appraisal should be capable of showing that too. The point is not that action always wins. It is that the contest should be run with all the costs on the table, including the one that usually hides.

The question for councils

The most consequential estate decisions an authority makes are not always the visible ones - the disposal approved, the scheme commissioned. Sometimes the most consequential decision is the one never recognised as a decision at all: the year-after-year continuation of an asset whose true cost has never been written down, drifting toward a point at which the choice is eventually made under pressure rather than in good order.

Before an authority decides whether to retain, repurpose or dispose of an asset, it should first establish the full cost of retaining it. In many cases that figure is never properly worked out, and the result is the asymmetry this article began with: active options subjected to detailed scrutiny while continuation proceeds largely untested. Strategic asset management is ultimately about choices - where scarce capital is invested, which liabilities are carried forward, and which assets continue to justify their place in the portfolio - and those choices become far harder to defend when one of the options has never been properly costed. Good estate strategy is not about forcing a particular outcome. It is about ensuring that every option - including doing nothing - is evaluated on the same basis. The status quo may still be the right answer; but it should win on evidence, not on omission.

About the Author

Kane Lennon is a Director of LGPC (Local Government Property Consultants), established in September 2024. LGPC forms part of the award-winning consultancy team recognised as Consultancy of the Year 2025, specialising in innovative estate strategy, asset rationalisation, surplus land release, and housing-focused advisory for councils and education providers across England.