The government is set to outline its approach to private investment in major construction projects in its upcoming 10-year infrastructure strategy, a senior cabinet minister has said.
A chapter in the strategy document, due in June, will outline the government’s approach to attracting private capital across civils projects, housing and public facilities, chief secretary to the treasury Darren Jones told Construction News.
The government will draw from research by the British Infrastructure Taskforce, a group of domestic and foreign investors set up when Labour was in opposition. The taskforce will present its findings in the “next couple of weeks”, Jones said.
Among the topics the taskforce is investigating are lessons from the PFI model in the run-up to 2010 and international best practice.
The government has previously proposed bringing in private investment in some of the UK’s largest infrastructure projects, including HS2 and the Lower Thames Crossing.
Jones was speaking to CN to mark the launch of the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA). The new strategy and delivery agency sits directly within the Treasury, unlike the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) and Infrastructure Projects Authority (IPA), whose functions it combines.
Alongside developing and implementing the 10-year strategy, the streamlined agency will also provide an “online and dynamic” platform businesses can use to keep track of upcoming projects.
“You have the 10-year infrastructure strategy, you have five-year capital budgets and then every two years when we do the spending review we’ll use that as a gatekeeping process to make ‘go/no-go’ decisions for projects coming into the pipeline,” Jones told CN.
The strategy and 2025-2030 capital budget will be published alongside the spending review in June. The 2030-2035 capital budget will be set at the 2027 spending review, Jones added.
For the first time, this centrally coordinated infrastructure pipeline will include housing and social infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals, GP surgeries and prisons.
“Projects that aren’t designed well and are not ready to be delivered won’t be funded,” Jones said. “We want industry to have the confidence in knowing from the pipeline that there’s a level of work coming down the track so that they can invest in their staff and supply chain.”
HS2 chief executive Mark Wild added that five-year funding settlements are common practice in other countries.
Jones also revealed that he co-led a Cabinet Office subcommittee with senior minister Pat McFadden, which runs an internal dashboard tracking development consent orders.
NISTA formally launched last week. It merges the independent NIC, which recommended strategy to government, and the delivery-focused IPA, which sat within the Cabinet Office.
Jones said NISTA would appoint an external advisory panel to provide the independent scrutiny function previously offered by the NIC.
“Everyone recognised the NIC was doing good strategic work but the last government didn’t really implement it, so it was a bit of an academic exercise,” he said.
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Charlotte Banks