Civils contractors have welcomed reports that a future Labour administration would merge the government’s two main infrastructure delivery bodies.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Darren Jones, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said his party plans to bring the functions of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority and the National Infrastructure Commission into a single organisation.
A new body, the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, would set the planning, design and cost criteria that projects would have to meet before money was released, Jones said.
“The problem we are trying to fix is Britain can’t really build anything anymore,” Jones told the FT.
“Investors look at the UK and don’t believe we’re going to build the things we say we’re going to build.”
The proposal came out of a capital projects review undertaken by the Labour Party, to which the Civil Engineering Contractors Association (CECA) contributed.
CECA chief executive Alasdair Reisner said: “This announcement may well have flown under the radar yesterday due to the prime minister naming the date of the general election. But for industry it really matters.”
Reisner said that he hoped other parties would make similar commitments to “put infrastructure policy at the heart of government thinking”.
In March, the current government announced its own review into speeding up infrastructure projects, led by Charles Banner KC.
That review was set to take three months, but its future is now uncertain following yesterday’s announcement by prime minister Rishi Sunak that a general election will be held on 4 July.