How can the public sector plan and deliver more inclusive and sustainable infrastructure?

Public Practice, together with the Greater London Authority (GLA) Infrastructure team, brought together a panel of practitioners to discuss how the public sector can deliver better infrastructure. The timing in early July 2020 made for a topical discussion, hot on the heels of announcements from central government about significant infrastructure investment along with further reforms to planning.

The panel, speaking to an audience of over 130 attendees, was chaired by Phil Graham, Executive Director of Good Growth at the GLA. A wide-ranging discussion explored the role of the public sector in planning and delivering more inclusive infrastructure. It was clear from the discussion that there is no one size fits all solution.

Engagement, coordination, education, training and review are all well-established principles that hold true. But we need a more diverse industry that can understand and communicate with the communities most impacted by infrastructure, or a lack of it, to make infrastructure more inclusive. And we need to ask broader questions about the purpose of infrastructure in the first place, as well as the ways we fund, own and manage it, to make infrastructure more sustainable.