National Infrastructure Assessment 1 (2018)

The first Assessment mades a series of recommendations, including on:

• Low carbon energy – making a switch to low-carbon and renewable sources for both the country’s power and heating, combined with a move towards electric vehicles, would mean the customer of 2050 would pay the same in real terms for their energy as today
• Digital technology – that the Government devise a National Broadband Plan by Spring 2019, to deliver full fibre connections across the whole of the country, including those in rural areas – this should ensure that the technology is available to 15 million homes and businesses by 2025, 25 million by 2030, and all homes and businesses by 2033
• The future for the nation’s roads – that the Government work with councils and private companies to deliver a national network of charging points for electric vehicles and ensures that the impacts of connected and autonomous vehicles are taken into account when planning for the next rail control period and road investment strategy
• Encouraging growth of cities – that Metro Mayors and city leaders develop and implement long-term strategies for transport, employment and housing in their areas, to support economic growth, with new powers and devolved infrastructure budgets. The National Infrastructure Assessment’s spending plans include funding for projects including Crossrail 2 in London, and Northern Powerhouse Rail linking the major Northern cities, and recommends a boost in funding for major cities totalling £43 billion to 2040, with cities given stable five-year budgets, starting in 2021
• Tackling floods – that the Government should put in place a long-term strategy to deliver a nationwide standard of flood resilience by 2050 with funding for flood risk management increasing significantly over the coming decades
• Cutting waste – that new national rules for what can and cannot be recycled be introduced, with restrictions on the hardest-to-recycle plastics, aimed at increasing rates and reducing the amount of plastics going to incinerators. This would also mean that all food waste is separated making it available to create biogas, so it can be used to heat people’s homes and potentially as a transport fuel.

More information on each chapter of the Assessment can be found in the tabbed content.

Infrastructure can inspire confidence and growth. But long term projects require a long term vision, lasting plans, and stable funding.

Too often, the delivery of the UK’s major infrastructure projects has been slow and uncertain. Airport expansion in the south east is the best known, but not the only, example. The Mersey Gateway Bridge, which opened in October 2017, was proposed in 1994. Crossrail, due to open this year, was originally proposed in 1974. Consequently, much of the country’s infrastructure has not kept pace with population growth, demand and advances in technology. The UK must stop running to stand still.

The National Infrastructure Commission was set up to address the problems with long term infrastructure planning in the UK. This first National Infrastructure Assessment builds on the analysis in the Commission’s interim report, Congestion, Capacity, Carbon: Priorities for national infrastructure, to set out a long term vision for high quality, good value, sustainable economic infrastructure for the UK, and a clear plan to achieve it.

Its core principles include:

• nationwide full fibre broadband by 2033
• half of the UK’s power provided by renewables by 2030
• three quarters of plastic packaging recycled by 2030
• £43 billion of stable long term transport funding for regional cities
• preparing for 100 per cent electric vehicle sales by 2030
• ensuring resilience to extreme drought through additional supply and demand reduction
• a national standard of flood resilience for all communities by 2050.

It also highlights the most important future challenges. Heating must no longer be provided by natural gas, a fossil fuel. The UK must prepare for connected and autonomous vehicles. These need more time for evidence or technology to develop. The Assessment sets out the actions needed to enable robust decisions to be taken in future.

Digital connectivity will increasingly drive the country’s economic growth, competitiveness and quality of life. Digital communications makes it easier for customers and suppliers to find each other and exchange goods and services. In future, innovations such as artificial intelligence and the internet of things will bring new applications that rely on digital connectivity, from driverless cars to increased use of virtual reality.

Government needs to make a decision on full fibre now to avoid the risk of the UK being left behind in years to come. Full fibre will deliver benefits to current broadband even if the expected demand growth does not materialise. Enhanced digital connectivity will also facilitate the development of smart infrastructure: infrastructure with digital connections, enabling more efficient management and maintenance.

The UK can and should have low cost and low carbon electricity, heat and waste. Ten years ago, it seemed almost impossible that the UK would be able to be powered mainly be renewable energy in an affordable and reliable way. But there has been a quiet revolution going on in this area. There is ample scope to build on this success in years to come. Highly renewable, clean, and low cost energy and waste systems increasingly appear to be achievable.

Sustaining progress on reducing emissions requires government to show ambition. The crucial first step is to enable an increasing deployment of renewables. The Commission’s modelling has shown that a highly renewable generation mix is a low cost option for the energy system. The cost would be comparable to building further nuclear power plants after Hinkley Point C, and cheaper than implementing carbon capture and storage with the existing system. The electricity system should be running off 50 per cent renewable generation by 2030, as part of a transition to a highly renewable generation mix. Government should not agree support for more than one nuclear power station beyond Hinkley Point C before 2025.

Note: on 16 April 2019 the Chief Executive of the National Infrastructure Commission wrote to the Chair of the Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Select Committee to provide additional information and correct two errors identified in this chapter. A copy of the letter is available here.

By 2050, road transport will be unrecognizable from today. Cars and vans will be electric, and increasingly autonomous. Electric, connected and autonomous vehicles will change the nature of the transport debate in the UK. Electric vehicles are easier to drive, quieter and less polluting than conventional cars and will soon have the same range and be cheaper to buy and maintain. Once this happens, their take up could increase rapidly. Given their benefits for the environment, this is something government should encourage. A key way to do this is by ensuring that charging an electric vehicle is as easy as refilling a conventional vehicle, or even easier.

In the longer term, connected and autonomous vehicles will bring even greater changes to the UK’s roads. They will improve safety, and could allow more people to use personal transport and free up driving time for work or leisure. They may even encourage a shift towards increased vehicle sharing and reduced car ownership. Traffic lights and stop signs may become unnecessary, speed limits could be higher, and the use of road space could be automatically and constantly changing according to need. But, with road and rail projects lasting for decades, government needs to start taking the potential future impacts into account now as it makes investment plans.

Cities can be great places to live, with excellent public transport systems, well-designed public spaces for leisure and social activities, and flourishing, well-connected businesses. They are also engines of economic growth.

However, as urban populations increase, many cities are becoming full and congested, and this is inhibiting economic development and reducing quality of life. For all their benefits, neither electric nor connected and autonomous vehicles will solve the problems of urban transport; rather they are likely to increase the number of drivers on the roads.

Government and cities need to act now to ensure that space in cities is used effectively, with room allocated for fast, frequent public transport systems, well-connected and affordable housing, and pleasant public spaces. This will require a new approach to governance, strategy and funding.

To deliver thriving cities, metro mayors and other city leaders should develop integrated strategies for transport, employment and housing. Housing and infrastructure should be planned together: new housing requires new infrastructure. These integrated strategies should be backed up by stable, substantial, devolved funding. And for the cities that face the most severe capacity constraints, and with the most potential for growth, there should be additional funding to support major upgrade programmes, which would be agreed between the cities and central government.

Climate change will continue to make extreme weather events such as floods and drought more likely in future years, and cities, towns and villages must be resilient. Decisive policy action is needed to mitigate these risks. About 5 million properties in the UK are currently at risk of flooding. Protection from floods in the UK over the past years has too often been reactive rather than proactive. Ideally, no one should be exposed to flooding. Flooding has severe impacts on quality of life, particularly mental health.

A long term strategy for flood protection would allow a nationwide standard of resilience to flooding, with catchment based plans. These plans should evaluate the full range of options including traditional flood defences, ‘green infrastructure’ (whether natural flood management or sustainable drainage systems), individual property measures and spatial planning.

Ahead of the Assesment, the Commission published a standalone report Preparing for a drier future: England’s water infrastructure needs, which set out a twin-track approach to manage water supply and demand. The government, working with Ofwat and water companies, needs to ensure the capacity of the water supply system in England is increased to boost the country’s resilience to drought whilst also managing demand and reducing leakage.

For government and relevant industries to take decisive action on their infrastructure projects, they need to have confidence that their decision making is as good as possible. Long term decisions inevitably carry risk, but these risks need to be taken, and uncertainty managed as much as possible.

Decision making can be improved through robust analysis of the performance of existing infrastructure and recognising the value of good design in infrastructure. Not everything can be reduced to numbers, but there should be an effective methodology to measure the quality of the UK’s current infrastructure to reliably inform assessments of future needs.

While the Commission’s recommendations comprise an ambitious programme of investment, this is not an unaffordable wish list. A crucial factor in the development of this Assessment has been the fiscal remit set by government. This provides a long-term funding guideline for public investment in infrastructure of 1.0 to 1.2 per cent of GDP, including existing government funding commitments such as HS2.

Where infrastructure is funded by the private sector, and the costs of any recommendations will ultimately be met directly by consumers, the Commission has also provided a transparent assessment of the overall impact on bills. Where recommendations have net costs, the Commission believes that these are manageable and good value relative to the benefits the infrastructure provides.

The recommendations in this Assessment, and the implications for public expenditure and for bills, reflect the judgement of the Commission. In reaching its conclusions, the Commission has drawn on a wide range of evidence. Uncertainty is inevitable given the timescales for infrastructure investment, and so the Commission has also sought to understand how robust its decisions are to uncertainty, seeking solutions that will stand the test of time.

The Commission has outlined an ambitious set of recommendations. As the first Assessment, it could never solve everything. The Commission has therefore focused on key priorities to equip the UK with the infrastructure it needs. These recommendations will enable the UK to have a thriving digital economy, a low cost, low carbon energy and waste network, clean air, successful cities, and resilience to extreme weather.

But the Commission cannot achieve this alone. Government, regulators, industry, citizen and others will all need to contribute to making this vision a reality. Over the coming months, the Commission will work to build consensus around its recommendations.

The government’s response will set out which recommendations it has agreed to, any further work required to take forward the recommendations, and alternative proposals for any recommendations it has not agreed. The Commission will monitor progress in delivering government endorsed recommendations, and will report on this in its Annual Monitoring Reports. The second Assessment, expected around 2023, will build on the recommendations in this report, as well as covering new ground.

The first such assessment was published in July 2018. It covers all the key sectors of economic infrastructure, setting out recommendations for transport, energy, water and waste water, flood resilience, digital connectivity, and solid waste, from now until 2050.

The Commission’s remit also includes the potential interactions between its infrastructure recommendations and housing, but not housing supply in general. The Assessment is guided by the Commission’s objectives to support sustainable economic growth across all regions of the UK, improve competitiveness and improve quality of life.

The government has given the Commission a long term funding guideline for its recommendations, known as the ‘fiscal remit’. Confirmation of this remit, alongside the areas to be covered in the Assessment, is set out in a letter from the Chancellor sent in November 2016.

The strategies within the Assessment were informed by responses to the Commission’s consultation following the publication of the interim report Congestion, Capacity, Carbon: Priorities for national infrastructure. The Commission also worked closely with experts, seeking diverse views across sectors and regions, asking the public for their views, and through internal analysis and modelling.

Reports reflecting this research and analysis can be found below.