UK Infrastructure: 10-year Strategy

Lord Harrington of Watford Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful for what my noble friend said. I share his enthusiasm for what we are doing in the innovation landscape, such as putting a record high of £22.6 billion into R&D as part of the spending review. It is exciting that yesterday the industrial strategy talked about allocating £2 billion for AI and £2.8 billion for advanced manufacturing. This is all incredibly important.

What my noble friend said is absolutely part of what the National Wealth Fund is for. My noble friend talked about start-ups and scale-ups. The British Business Bank now has a total financial capacity of £25.6 billion, which will result in a two-thirds increase in support for innovative UK businesses compared with 2025-26, crowding in tens of billions of pounds more in private capital The National Wealth Fund will play that role, but so too will the British Business Bank. That was one of the key announcements in yesterday’s industrial strategy.

[Lord Harrington of Watford (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I shall do my best to comply with the spirit of cross-party consensus day. I should first declare from the register that I am chairman of Make UK, which has more than 20,000 member companies in manufacturing and infrastructure. I commend the Government on this 10-year infrastructure plan and yesterday’s industrial strategy because I did a review for the previous Government on foreign direct investment. Lack of consistency of policy was the number one item, and the others were connection to the grid, planning and other delays.

I want to ask the Minister about monitoring implementation. For the main industrial strategy, the Government have quite correctly set up an industrial strategy council where each sector—life sciences, advanced manufacturing, et cetera—has groups to monitor the implementation of the industrial strategy. The infrastructure plan is very complex; it includes skills, access to finance and, of course, energy and very large things. What mechanism will be used to independently monitor its implementation?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for the positive things that he said. I pay tribute to him and to Make UK for the work that they do. Clearly, the skills conversation that we just had is vital in that sector. Make UK always makes the point to me about the vital importance of engineering skills, so I hope that that is welcome.

The noble Lord did indeed do his review into foreign direct investment. I hope he does not think that it was just for the previous Government; we still talk about it now in this Government. A lot of the recommendations that he made in that review are things that we have been trying to take forward in this Government. That is a good example of the cross-party working that we have been discussing today.

The noble Lord is right that the industrial strategy will be taken forward by the industrial strategy council; that will be put on a permanent footing, which I think is important. His question is about the equivalent for this strategy. That is the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority—NISTA—which I was talking about. It will monitor the strategy and help the Government to implement it. It will do two-year refreshes of this strategy to make sure that it is up to date and doing what it needs to do. Crucially, it will provide real-terms advice to Ministers when it comes to individual projects to make sure that we have the expertise that we need at our fingertips to be able to implement them.