UK Infrastructure: 10-year Strategy

Earl Russell Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches very much welcome this report. Of course, after decades of underinvestment, it is essential to ensure that our country can operate appropriately.

I will ask the Minister about infrastructure and adaption and resilience to climate change. Our climate is changing before our very eyes. In a number of places in this report there are vague promises to do things, not firm commitments. To pick up one example, although we welcome the £7.9 billion of capital for a new 10-year flood investment programme, the report says that the Government will merely “explore” setting a long-term, multiyear target for flood risk management in line with prior recommendations made by the NAO and the NIC. Will the Government go further on these things, recognise the speed at which climate change is happening, and put more effort into ensuring that we have the best policies in place?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I agree with the noble Earl on the importance of investment in net zero and measures to tackle climate change. From a growth perspective, it is not one or the other for those investments; they go hand in hand.

I do not quite agree with the noble Earl’s view on the vagueness of these commitments. We are putting real money behind real projects: £14.2 billion into nuclear; £9.4 billion into carbon capture and storage; £80 million of investment in ports to support floating offshore wind; and £13.2 billion for the warm homes plan. This is a huge amount of investment into real concrete action to move us forward. We were talking before about getting people on to public transport—for example, in relation to take-up of EVs. Action is going on across the board on the measures that he talked about. I am grateful to him for his support on that.