Constructing Excellence devises 25-year infrastructure plan

The industry is to draw up its own 25-year plan for UK infrastructure to help influence the government's spending plans in future years. Announcing the plans at the launch of Constructing Excellence's (CE) new Infrastructure Forum last Thursday, CE chief operating officer Don Ward told CJ that the report, due to be published in the middle of next year, would provide the government with no illusion as to where its money should be spent.

"We will go to the Treasury with this report and say to them that this is where the investment on infrastructure is looking to go over the next 25 years and this is where you should be spending your money. "Although the government will claim that it organises its spending in three-yearly cycles, this plan will give the government a much greater focus on longer-term spending. It will also mean that it won't be spending its money on topical issues at that particular moment in time. It will bring it back into a much sharper focus." Ward said the report, which would be fairly detailed and will include financial spending models, would draw on all the expertise of the industry, including trade associations such as the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Construction Products Association and the Civil Engineering Contractors Association.

The forum will also be concentrating its efforts on the four other priority areas of: collaborative working and integration leadership sustainability and innovation and design.

[Contract Journal, 06  December 2006, p 3]