Private infrastructure investment in the UK has fallen by a third since 2015 while public investment has stagnated. This has resulted in a severely underperforming UK infrastructure system, with delayed access to energy, congested and environmentally damaging transport, and a wasteful water system. If no action is taken, we face a potential £700bn funding shortfall for infrastructure by 2040.
Recent government reforms are positive, but to fix the foundations of our economy, we need to shift a gear up. This briefing paper, supported by Headland, introduces five essential steps to do that:
- Strategy: centre infrastructure within the national growth mission, with a small, agile team to coordinate strategy on infrastructure across bodies and departments.
- Delivery: beef up the National Infrastructure Service and Transformation Authority, giving it the power to set investment benchmarks and help develop delivery plans for all major infrastructure projects.
- Finance: gear tax and spending towards investment; with a long-term settlement for public investment, investment conditionalities, and tax reforms to unlock investment.
- Planning: streamline planning processes by engaging the public “upstream”. This means representative groups of the public discussing and agreeing on principles for infrastructure development at the regional or national level.
- Skills: mandate Skill England to advance the STEM skills needed to deliver government infrastructure strategies.
These steps not only offer a roadmap to transforming infrastructure, but would catalyse all of the government’s missions for national renewal. The UK can’t afford to wait.
This paper follows on from Demos’s 2024 paper supported by Headland, Partnership in Practice.