Industry demands ‘clarity, certainty and reality’ from infrastructure strategy as government poised to announce £750bn blueprint

The government is set to announce its strategy for investing in and delivering major infrastructure over the next decade.

The 10-year infrastructure strategy, which will see the government spend at least £750bn, is set to include a pipeline of projects, intended to give industry confidence to invest.

The Treasury has committed to publishing the document this week, with reports it could come out as early as today.

A structures fund worth £1bn to enhance and repair road infrastructure is set to be included, as well as £590m to take forward the Lower Thames Crossing.

Public procurement rules could also be overhauled, according to reports in the Indpendent, with more weight given to firms that can prove an impact on British jobs.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves said: “When it comes to investing in Britain’s renewal, we’re going all in by going up against the painful disruption of closed bridges, crossings and flyovers, and ensure they’re fit to serve working people for decades to come.

“Today’s investment also goes even further and faster to spread growth by providing critical funding to take forward the Lower Thames Crossing – not just boosting connectivity in the South East, but ensuring a smoother, less congested passage of vital goods from Europe to our regions.”

The strategy comes shortly after last week’s spending review, which gave an indication of the government’s infrastructure priorities.

Rachel Reeves committed £39bn for affordable homes and £15bn for transport improvements across the North and Midlands, as well as £14.2bn to build Sizewell C and £2.5bn for small modular reactors.

Sector experts who spoke to Building praised the spending review for its significant investments in these areas.

Holly Davis, infrastructure advisory director at KPMG, said that the spending review will have been more significant for industry confidence than whatever is announced in the 10-year strategy. 

A general election in 2029, she said, “could impact priorities across the Infrastructure Strategy period”.

James Corrigan, UK managing director for infrastructure, Turner & Townsend (T&T), said that while the four-year finance agreements put in place at the spending review would ”provide much greater certainty for the sector than the typical one-year cycles which have chipped away at confidence in recent years”, these high level numbers ”don’t mean much without a coherent and considered strategy around their delivery”.

”We now need the Infrastructure Strategy to provide the clarity around priority programmes, timings and milestones, and the details on both public and private funding,” he said.

“It’s the strategy which will truly give the sector certainty to invest in and build the skills and capacity we need to deliver government’s ambitions – and, crucially, for private investors to have the confidence to put their stake in the UK’s infrastructure.”

Brian Yates, UK&I managing director at Stantec, said the two were “integrally linked” and that the strategy would “really show if the government is on the right track”.

Jonathan Spruce, trustee for policy and external affairs at the Institution for Civil Engineers, said power supply and climate resilience had not been addressed in detail in the spending review and said he hoped these would be more prominent in the strategy.

>> Read more: Industry welcomes boost to infrastructure and housing in spending review

>> What will the infrastructure strategy say about private finance?  

The industry needed “clarity, certainty and reality” from the strategy, he said. 

“We need to identify what we really need to do, and to be clear about those; we then need to be certain there is a long term funding plan, whether that’s public, private, or a combination thereof; and then we need to be real about making this happen,” he said. 

“That industry confidence allows you to look at supply chains and skills and allows you to look at the real use of technology”.

He said he was particularly interested in the adaptive pipeline that is reportedly set to replace the previous approach, which Spruce described as simply “PDFs on the government website”.

According to The TImes, the government is set to launch a whole new website to host the adaptive pipeline.

Richard Risdon, executive board director and regional managing director for UK and Europe at Mott MacDonald, said he wanted to see “a commitment that projects start with an adequate state of design maturity”.

KPMG’s Davis said a good infrastructure strategy would acknowledge interdependence between sectors.

“For example, a barrier to growth and housing development in Cambridge is the availability of water,” she said. “So a good infrastructure strategy will take a whole system view, which will give the industry confidence because those fundamentals which would otherwise see infrastructure programmes get knocked back at the planning stage have already been considered.”

The strategy is expected to include proposals for how the government plans to encourage private investment into infrastructure.

Davis said one potential model is the mutual investment model of private financing, currently being used on some programmes in Wales. However, she said people in the sector retained an “open mind” on options.

>> Also read: What the Lower Thames Crossing and Euston station projects say about the government’s private finance plans

>> What would a new generation of PFI mean for construction?

Yates at Stantec questioned how Skills England’s work would be integrated with infrastructure plans, while chief executive of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, Alasdair Reisner, said the approach to skills should “not just” bolster traditional construction skills, but also “bring in new and diverse skillsets”.

”Developing digital talent across the sector, for example, will help us to make more efficient use of the skills we already have and deliver value for investors and taxpayers,” he said.

T&T’s Corrigan agreed: “We need the Industrial Strategy to set out a plan for skills to ensure we have the capacity and capabilities to deliver.

“Delivering the ambitions of the Government in terms of infrastructure will require a workforce with the right skills, in the right places, at the right time – without a coherent and inclusive skills plan, delivery risks being constrained by labour shortages and capacity gaps.

Yates added: “Equally, it will be important to see how the strategy dovetails with the wider devolution agenda, with regional focuses on respective areas of strength, and local investment that enables authorities to maximise the opportunities presented by the strategy”.

Alex Vaughan, chief executive at Costain, said that while having a long-term, rolling plan for infrastructure was a “huge step”, he hoped to see creation of a cabinet-level minister for infrastructure, describing it as the “missing piece of the puzzle”.

”This role is needed as the custodian of the 10-year infrastructure strategy, joining-up government departments, their agencies, and regulators who know that most infrastructure projects will run well beyond their term in office,” he said.

“Many of our peers on the global stage – including France, Canada and Japan – already have similar roles in their governments.”