Comment

Creating the holistic view of infrastructure

Should Treasury model its future national infrastructure planning on the outcome-based London 2050 Plan, asks Antony Oliver.

Antony Oliver, Infrastructure Intelligence editor

 David Cameron’s seemingly off-the-cuff comments this weekend casting doubt over the long term delivery of vital infrastructure projects under Labour, will no doubt be fiercely disputed by the Labour Party.

However, they do serve to demonstrate once again just how vulnerable, despite the progress made over the last five years to create the umbilical link between infrastructure investment and economic growth, both programmes and individual scheme remain to politics.

Perhaps, therefore, Treasury ought to take a closer look at the way the Greater London Authority is planning infrastructure for the capital as a model for the future with its new 2050 Plan?

Of course, avoiding the traditional start-stop, pet project approach to infrastructure has been one of the goals of the Coalition. The National Infrastructure Plan was designed precisely with this in mind – to set out what has to be done to create the modern economic infrastructure needed to drive the nation and provide the industry with a pipeline with which to plan for the future.

"Without this ability to truly join up different silos of investment from transport to energy to housing to education and health, we will struggle to create the vital business cases needed to attract private sector investment"

The industry, of course, needs to have this degree of certainty to enable it to plan. Regardless of what any particular party might do to existing plans post-Election – and the manifestos last week certainly threw up a few options – industry needs to believe that, if it invests in staff and resources today the rug will not be politically ripped from beneath it later.

But more than that, the investment market needs to have that confidence. The reality is that, with 65% of the £466bn on the NIP scheduled to be delivered by the private sector, the key to success is building the business cases that stack up over the medium to long term.

This Election serves to highlight just how fragile this confidence remains. For all its value, the NIP does still remain a list of projects which is being worked through – or not.

By contrast London’s 20150 Infrastructure Plan, appears to take a bolder, more holistic view, not at projects but at outcomes.

Speaking at the launch of this week’s Green Sky Thinking Week in the capital, Mace chief executive Mark Reynolds underlined this point. 

“The London Infrastructure Plan takes a step back and looks at what we are minded to achieve from the investment,” he explained pointing out that the National Infrastructure Plan could learn from this approach as right now it is not strategic enough.

Reynolds, like many in the industry, clearly values the progress made over the last five years to create and drive the National Infrastructure Plan as a focus for maintaining investment. But it is this need to strategically link up economic infrastructure with social infrastructure and housing that still leaves the NIP wanting.

Without this ability to truly join up different silos of investment from transport to energy to housing to education and health, we will struggle to create the vital business cases needed to attract private sector investment and so underpin to ever reducing quantity of public funds available.

And for the industry that makes it harder to  plan resources and to invest in long term staff, training and technology – a situation that no one could ever agree provides a recipe for the future.

Much will change post-Election. And much will remain the same. when it comes to infrastructure delivery the next administration must learn from successes of the last five years and create a forward looking environment that makes it possible for investors to invest and for the industry to deliver.  

Antony Oliver is the editor of Infrastructure Intelligence

If you would like to contact Antony Oliver about this, or any other story, please email antony.oliver@infrastructure-intelligence.com.

Comments

Isn't the point that London is a sensible scale for much planning, particularly of transport? Sub-national areas also escape the destructive micro-scrutiny and tinkering of national politicians and their media hangers-on (all desperate for daily new initiatives, scandals, announcements, etc.) Other parts of England could follow London's lead if they had the power (and London could do more with more power). Westminster and Whitehall are rarely the place to look for solutions.