Prior to the release of the Government’s 10 Year Strategy, the infrastructure challenges facing the UK were no secret. As of October 2024, the maintenance backlog of government properties had reached at least £49bn, marking the serious decline faced by parts of the public estate, especially in the period since 2008. 

We read the article ‘Government inheriting poor value assets due to bad handling of PFI contracts, watchdog says’ with interest. 

Firstly, the government is not currently inheriting poor value assets. Approximately 650 out of 700 PFIs are still operational and no formal published assessment, to any defined success markers, has been made of assets that have been handed back. The jury is still out.

Following the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC’s) recent report titled ‘Government’s Use of Private Finance for Infrastructure’, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Chair of the PAC, published an article in CityAM expanding on some of the committee’s observations, and the recommendations made.

We welcome the political commitment in today’s 10 Year Infrastructure Strategy to recognise and prioritise infrastructure as the foundation of the nation’s economy.

The decision to invest [£790bn] has been a long time coming after decades of lost investment and in the context of a rapidly growing maintenance backlog in the public sector estate and a clear need to rebuild Britain.

In the recent oral evidence session for the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) ‘Government’s use of private finance for infrastructure’ inquiry, Matthew Vickerstaff, Deputy CEO of the National Infrastructure Services and Transformation Authority (NISTA), stated that -

‘Some of them [schools] should have never been in the [PFI] programme because they were old Victorian schools which had latent defects which were taken on by the local authority. That’s where… problematic issues have been’. 

Whilst the removal of 10 Projects from the recent dataset (7 of which reached their contractual expiry date) shows that the IPA are actively managing the information provided by stakeholders, Curshaw believes more is needed to be done to deliver HM Treasury’s commitment to provide transparency of PFI and PF2 Projects. This includes improving quality assurance of data entries, and the inclusion of metrics to demonstrate operational performance levels of these assets, which are worth over £50 Billion in capital value.

Today the NAO has published its report on the lessons to be learned from private financing of infrastructure. 

The report is timely in the context of the government’s ambition to rebuild Britain against a backdrop of a chronic lack of investment, life safety risk in the public sector estate, an estimated maintenance backlog of £49bn and capital constraints that will be laid bare in the Spring Statement. 

Rachel Reeves has set out a series of major announcements on infrastructure projects, promising to go “further and faster” than previous governments after years of sluggish growth but does it go far enough?

The Backdrop - the UK as a “low investment” nation, maintenance backlogs, life safety risk and delays to social infrastructure programmes

Curshaw recently spent time with Ruth Todd, who has recently been appointed as Rolls-Royce SMR’s Operations and Supply Chain Director. The Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) is a ‘factory built’ nuclear power plant that will draw upon standard nuclear energy technology to generate 470MW of low carbon energy. As the UK’s first home-grown nuclear technology in a generation, it will provide enough consistent baseload electricity to power a million homes for at least 60 years.

We sat with Ruth to discuss the key questions Government should be deliberating as they develop their 10-year infrastructure plan, and begin budget deliberations for phase two and, in particular, two main questions:

1.What should be the prioritised infrastructure-related activities for the new government be?

2.What are the most important components that a new government policy on delivering infrastructure in partnership with the private sector should contain and focus on?

The recently published review of the NHS by Lord Darzi has confirmed the dire situation faced by the public estate.  The declining position of the NHS and broader public estate has already been apparent for some time, as we have previously written about.

This blogpost chronicles our difficulties in assessing key assumptions made in the NAO’s PFI and PFI 2 report. It highlights the lack of transparency available to sense-check some of the flagship statements that inform the opinions on PFI of both the general public and policy makers.

In this piece we are going to look at another crucial component of managing an efficient, equitable and effective (‘E3’) handback; the winding up of a Project’s Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV, or Project Co).

In this final post on the key topics outlined in the last National Audit Office Keynote, we will talk about our views on how organisations can reduce fraud and error by looking to adopt new technologies in an Agile way.

In the previous blog post (part 3) in our series we focused on public procurement being much more than just buying.

Most of us, without much thought, can name at least one contract that has made the headlines for the wrong reasons. Often these are contracts for infrastructure where there is scale and complexity; transport, health, defence, information and communication technology and digital goods and services.

In the third and last of our series of blogs tackling some of the key questions we have seen in the media around PFI and schools, we are looking at the questions that have been raised about flexibility, maintenance costs and poor quality service.

In the second of our series of blogs tackling some of the key questions we have seen in the media around PFI and schools, we are looking at accusations that contract providers are failing to deliver the services that are required by schools.

The recent media coverage of schools and maintenance services provided by private providers shows how the oversimplification of the issues around PFI and PFI contracts continues to lead to misunderstanding. Something that has plagued the industry for a number of years. We thought it would be useful to pick five of the key questions that have come out of these conversations and cut through the jargon to look behind the headlines.