When the Chancellor unveiled her Spending Review on 11 June, she simultaneously published the Guidance for Mayoral Strategic Authorities on developing Local Growth Plans. These are the key documents to be prepared by the 13 Mayoral regions and are intended to be a major driver for boosting the Government’s growth agenda.

Making sense of the 10-year Infrastructure strategy

It’s ironic that when a fragile Government seems to stagger from one Parliamentary crisis to another that we have a spate of 10-year plans seemingly based on an assumption of at least two terms in office. In the case of the Infrastructure Strategy – published in June 2025, ten years seems scarcely enough to build or rebuild what the UK needs.

 

Sceptics will accurately point out that large elements of the strategy have been in place in some form or another for quite a long time. After all, we have had a dozen National Policy Statements designated on various parts of our national infrastructure for years. They include everything from roads, rail, aviation, water, energy, ports, and so forth. Add them all up, and you’d think we already had an infrastructure strategy. In reality, that’s not the case. The piecemeal approach has evidently not worked very well, and the great virtue of the new strategy is that it brings everything together.

 

It also attempts something really ambitious, namely, to integrate economic infrastructure (transport, energy, water etc) with social infrastructure (schools, hospitals, courts etc). In this way it means to reduce the chilling effect that weaknesses of infrastructure has on building new housing or other forms of economic development. It hopes that planning reforms may help, and that capital markets will respond to greater certainty of commitment. Public-private partnerships appear to be back in favour.

 

Little of this should be contentious, but question marks remain over whether it is deliverable. In 2019, Boris Johnson’s boosterish optimism committed the nation to an ambitious agenda of levelling-up, a flagship high-speed rail plan, many new hospitals, and an aggressive approach to net zero. Sadly, the enthusiasm wilted after COVID, inflation and political uncertainty. The one thing all political parties (maybe excepting the Greens) now agree upon is that economic growth is essential, and the infrastructure renewal and investment is one of the best ways to make it happen.

 

The driving force will now be a new organisation called NISTA. It stands for the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority. There will also be an interactive project pipeline portal giving far more information about 300+ projects, promising greater granularity and transparency, presumably in order to raise awareness of the immense scale of the national portfolio of developments.

 

Ministers seem to recognise that central government co-ordination has to be a lot better, as too many Departments cling to their own silo-generated ways of building things. But, thankfully, it recognises that the Strategic Mayoral Authorities and the other new Unitaries are much more likely to get things done – if only because of a focus on local priorities. In simple terms, if you’re hoping to regenerate or invest in a significant part of a major city, you’re far more likely to make certain that the water and waste infrastructure is adequate. And that the flood protection scheme has been built. And the promised light-rail extension happens. And the electricity substation upgrade. In fact, all the other bits. Waiting for other state agencies, several stages removed to independently evaluate each project in isolation is what causes indecision, delay, and worse.

 

Westco sees the Infrastructure Strategy as a useful navigational guide to help local authorities grasp the wider picture. Its 100 pages of useful, but bureaucratically-obscure jargon is not the most readable document. Neither is it the best way to inform and motivate communities to support those local or regional initiatives that are needed. Instead, we need to develop comprehensible narratives for local government in a way that invites positive engagement and effective consultation.

 

One reason for our lacklustre infrastructure performance is that we have often imposed projects on communities or Councils in the spirit of ‘take it or leave it’. Sometimes it takes the form of “If you don’t want this investment, we’ll offer it somewhere else.” Levelling-up projects and their more recent successors have all obliged public officials to enter into a competitive bidding war instead of galvanising local people to work out what they want and campaign for it.

 

Let’s apply the same logic to the nationwide infrastructure challenge. There is an equivalent opportunity to develop a consensus that prioritises key investments and commits resources to them. That’s what will attract private investment. To do this, we need radical improvements in public and stakeholder engagement, and the good news is that much of this know-how is available.

 

It just needs an application ….

 

Author: 

Rhion Jones is the co-founder of The Consultation Institute and has been monitoring consultation case law since 2008. He has published 50+ commentaries on specific judicial reviews and delivered over 100 courses on the Law of Consultation. Rhion currently provides government and C-suite advice and guidance under his trading name, The Consultation Guru.