Place

Infrastructure can improve the economic prospects of local areas and help to enhance the distinct identities of the places where we live, work, and enjoy life.

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Summary

The Commission adopts a place based approach to its thinking, reflecting the results of social research which showed 8 in 10 people believe good infrastructure is necessary to support a good quality of life.

The Commission adopts a place-based approach to its thinking, reflecting the results of social research which showed 8 in 10 people believe good infrastructure is necessary to support a good quality of life.
Infrastructure helps form the identity of places as well as creating efficient links between them. Better transport infrastructure can alleviate bottlenecks to growth in congested areas and improve connectivity, while infrastructure improvements also have the potential, alongside other policies such as skills training, to increase growth in lower productivity areas and help efforts to level up the economy.
Our towns study, for example, found that transport and digital infrastructure in particularly have an important role in supporting economic growth & better quality of life in towns and cities; while our 2022 Getting cities moving report identified the need to get more people making more trips into and around city centres to boost growth in English cities outside of London, without adding to congestion or undermining existing net zero objectives.
These reports informed many of the recommendations in the Second National Infrastructure Assessment on supporting growth in all regions of the country. These include:

  • cities adopting flexible strategic transport plans that can adapt to a range of future transport demand scenarios – backed up by £22 billion in long term funding for major transport projects between 2028 and 2045 – to get more people making more trips into and around city centres
  • to support this, government should make this long term funding for major projects conditional on the introduction of demand management schemes, to be designed to work best in a city’s local context
  • devolving power to local authorities responsible for strategic transport, to allow them to plan for the long term
  • ensuring gigabit capable connectivity is available nationwide by 2030, along with accelerating the deployment of 5G technology.

While the Commission’s remit does not include housing provision, we have advised government on how utility services can better support proposed housing developments and help enable the scale of house building needed to accommodate a growing population.

Data on place

A range of data sets relating to the theme of place is available to review on our Data pages. This includes data sets used in Commission reports, as well as historic data sets. Each can be reviewed online or downloaded. 

Review data

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Explore data used in the Commission's research, and gain insights from across UK infrastructure