As Andy Burnham prepares to take office as prime minister, Ian Dean, Managing Director of Holcim UK, says he has a genuine opportunity to reset Britain's approach to construction and infrastructure, by breaking a fifteen-year cycle of political churn that has done more to hold back growth than any shortage of funding or ambition.
The UK faces a record £18.62 billion backlog of local road repairs, up from £16.8 billion the previous year, and as independent analysis puts the true cost of the country's infrastructure needs at up to £1.96 trillion by 2040; nearly £1 trillion more than government funding currently covers.
Britain has enough growth plans to fill a library. What's missing is a government that sticks around long enough to deliver one. Look at the housing brief: there have been 17 different housing ministers since 2010. Each one arrives with a fresh plan and leaves before it can work. You cannot fix a housing crisis in the time it takes to redecorate an office.
The UK's fiscal rules, while necessary for market confidence, have repeatedly been used as a reason to delay the long-term investment the country needs. When growth forecasts worsen, Chancellors have tended to scale back infrastructure, housing and local growth spending to protect their fiscal headroom, even where this undermines the very growth that headroom depends on.
Caution has a price, and the industry pays it in arrears. Every delayed decision doesn't disappear; it just gets more expensive. The AA logged 137,000 pothole call-outs in January and February alone this year, 25,000 more than the same period the year before. That's what happens when maintenance keeps losing out to whatever crisis shouts loudest that week.
Government has committed at least £725 billion of public funding to infrastructure over the next decade, backed by a 10-year Infrastructure Strategy and a pipeline of 780 major projects. I welcome this but would argue that the private capital needed to close the remaining funding gap will only materialise if government can offer investors something it has struggled to provide for over a decade: certainty.
Give housebuilders and contractors a credible, funded pipeline, and they invest ahead of demand. Take the certainty away, and they wait. The waiting shows up everywhere: fewer homes built, roads left cratered, materials innovation stuck at the pilot stage. Even decarbonising a supply chain properly takes long-term policy stability. You can't do it on an eighteen-month cycle.
None of this depends on which party holds office. It depends on whether whoever holds it can commit to a plan and hold their nerve when it gets difficult, because it will get difficult. The industry doesn't need government to remove all the risk. It needs government to stop being the biggest source of it.
Britain can build. It has proved that before. What it needs to relearn is how to finish what it starts.
