2025: Accelerating infrastructure delivery to unlock homes, jobs and skills to improve the quality of life within our city regions
Executive Summary
The Arcadis roundtable at Interchange Conference brought together senior regional stakeholders to discuss how infrastructure delivery could be accelerated to unlock homes, jobs and skills to improve the quality of life within our city regions.
The debate was wide ranging and brought together diverse opinions from public and private sector as well as from the investment community and education practitioners. Arcadis consider that there is an opportunity to build a more connected and prosperous future for city regions, tackling deprivation and unlocking economic potential, with the key themes from the roundtable summarised below:
Strategic Infrastructure Planning: It is essential to integrate transport and land-use planning to unlock homes, jobs, and skills, ensuring infrastructure drives regional economic growth. There is an opportunity to unlock underutilised infrastructure to create opportunities and connected communities.
Community-led Development: Community engagement underpins everything we do. Co-creation of solutions working with stakeholders will ensure that we are reflecting local priorities, building transparent narratives around long-term timelines, and highlighting tangible benefits to foster trust and alignment.
Leadership and Advocacy: A common success factor is bold civic and political leadership to articulate the value of infrastructure projects, manage disruptions, and build public trust. In doing so, it is crucial to emphasise wider social benefits, such as reducing deprivation and improving quality of life, alongside measurable outcomes to secure support.
Public-Private Collaboration: Critical to future success and delivery is the need to strengthen public-private partnerships by clearly defining roles, expectations, and shared objectives. There is an opportunity to unlock innovative funding mechanisms to address gaps in areas like social housing and transport reliability, ensuring projects are viable and impactful.
Devolution and Funding Certainty: We can see the transformation change devolution is beginning to delivery in places like Greater Manchester and Leeds City Region. Devolution can empower local decision-making and secure long-term funding pipelines. Multi-year settlements will provide the continuity needed for efficient and effective delivery of large-scale infrastructure projects, driving sustained regional progress.
The engaging discussion highlighted that the time to seize the opportunity for partnership and co-creation is now, accelerating infrastructure delivery to tackle deprivation and unlock economic potential.