Chancellor George Osborne’s autumn statement on Tuesday will have at its heart government plans to unlock £50 billion of private sector investment in construction and infrastructure, Construction News reported.
This will be accompanied by an updated Plan for Growth, published jointly with the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, in which infrastructure will be a central theme.
The government has pledged to unveil a list of 40 infrastructure projects that will be given priority status.
Speaking at the CBI annual conference this week, Prime Minister David Cameron said the Chancellor would focus on projects that “will genuinely lift the productive output of the country” such as roads, broadband, rail, power and ports.
He said: “Next week the Chancellor will be setting out the next stage of our plan to transform the nation’s infrastructure not with more government borrowing, but by using all the other tools at the government’s disposal to take a more strategic and proactive approach to infrastructure.
The projects – selected for their potential to provide growth – will not be given extra funding but will be fast-tracked by the government.
Mr Cameron said the “link between infrastructure and Enterprise Zones” would be “increasingly important” in helping deliver the priority projects.
Contractors have put forward more than 70 projects for the government to consider via seven of the industry’s largest trade bodies.
The autumn statement comes a week after the government launched its housing strategy. A mortgage indemnity scheme offering 95% loan to value mortgages for new build properties was chief among the strategy’s flagship announcements.
£400m investment in new development, supporting housebuilders in need of development finance was also announced, alongside plans to free up public sector land with “build now, pay later” deals for developers.
But the strategy faced criticism from industry figures. EC Harris head of strategic research Simon Rawlinson told Construction News that “most of the headline-grabbing proposals feel a bit short term”.
He added that the main criticism is that strategy is providing state support for house prices that remain unsustainably high and that once introduced, the mortgage indemnity will be very difficult to withdraw.
