Here Professor Michael Kenny FAcSS and Owen Garling of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy make the case for investment in the UK’s infrastructural ecosystem as a way to achieve a sustainable and geographically equitable pattern of economic growth.
The role of infrastructure in good growth
As has been made increasingly clear by the shocks experienced in the first quarter of this century, the prevailing economic model has become closely associated with significant levels of spatial inequality. Evocatively described as the new “geography of discontent,” this pattern of spatial inequality has provided the seedbed for some of the major political revolts of our times.
Devising political programmes and appropriate policy tools in the face of these challenges is a major concern of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Ensuring that we have a more geographically equitable model of economic growth – or as we put it, “the right kind of growth, shared by all” – is becoming an increasingly urgent imperative in many different contexts.
In the UK, this rhetorical emphasis on achieving more equitably distributed growth has been ubiquitous. Whilst the previous government spoke of ‘levelling up’ the country, the Starmer government talks of “sustainable, inclusive and resilient growth.” But how can the right kind of growth become a reality, and what are the tools and objectives that states need to have in mind when they contemplate such a grand ambition?
One way in which we have been considering how the government can play a more active strategic role is by examining the underpinning infrastructural ecosystem required for a more sustainable and geographically equitable pattern of growth is to be achieved.
The importance of investment in infrastructure has been recognised by the UK Government with the Industrial Strategy Green Paper arguing that “Improvements in infrastructure will be foundational to . . . addressing place-specific constraints to growth in city regions and sectoral clusters.” A 10-year Infrastructure Strategy is also due to be published alongside the Comprehensive Spending Review in June 2025.
Based on our own work we have four broad suggestions to offer to policy-makers interested in ensuring that the right kind of policy approach is developed in relation to the critical infrastructure of the UK to achieve a more equitable pattern of economic growth.
First, there should be more sensitivity to the different types of infrastructure that shape the fortunes and economic character of places. It is interesting to note that whilst the focus of the National Infrastructure Commission was purely on the UK’s key economic infrastructure, the recently published Infrastructure Strategy Working Paper takes a broader view and brings together social, economic, and housing infrastructure. This breadth of focus is undoubtedly welcome, but the examples included in the White Paper – hospitals, schools, colleges and prisons – betray an overly narrow understanding of what kinds of facility and space should be included in any understanding of these other categories of infrastructure. And in particular, they neglect the crucial set of ‘assets’ – from parks to playgrounds, green spaces to community centres – which together comprise the ‘social infrastructure’ of a place.
As our most recent report on this topic has highlighted, these kinds of facility and space, which are integral to the health and prosperity of communities, are easily overlooked, and often neglected, by policy-makers. And because social and cultural infrastructure often displays the same characteristics of other, more easily recognisable, forms of infrastructure – in that they are typically long-lived, available to all, and ‘non-rival’ in character, and are crucially enabling of other activities and forms of connectivity – they should be treated as integral to the government’s plans for infrastructure.
Second, policy-makers should attend more systematically to the ways in which different types of infrastructure interact with each other, and the multiplier effects that can arise when they are arranged in such a way that this happens productively. As American engineer Deb Chachra writes in her book, How Infrastructure Works, “all of these [infrastructural] systems interact and are entangled with one another, not just in technical ways . . . but in ways that are mediated by enormously complex social, legal, and regulatory systems.” However, these different types of infrastructure are typically counted, and often managed, entirely separately from each other, with decisions not necessarily taking into account the impact that they may have on other, critical forms of infrastructure.
And third, policy-makers and politicians should bring to the fore a question that is too rarely articulated and openly debated. What exactly is a reasonable ‘offer’ in terms of citizens’ access to infrastructural assets? How much variance are we prepared to tolerate as a country? And, relatedly, how far is the infrastructure provision in particular places from what we think is reasonable? The idea of an agreed, minimum standard as a benchmark against which current provision can be measured, and geographical gaps identified, is a key means of baking a more spatially informed understanding into the thinking and calculations of decision-makers. And it could have a major impact upon planning and policy decisions taken in different areas.
Our work on Universal Basic Infrastructure compares infrastructural provision across regions in England and Germany, and identifies a disparity of provision both between countries as well as between different communities within each country, with parts of England faring worse than parts of former East Germany. And whilst this lack of infrastructure is often stressed in the context of classically ‘left behind’ places, it also has implications for those areas that could contribute more readily to the government’s growth and housebuilding agendas. The lack of provision of adequate infrastructure could hamper both of these policy objectives.
Finally, a greater emphasis upon the future should be brought into policy-making in this area. The decisions that are taken today on infrastructure investment in its widest sense, will go a long way to shaping the social fabric and economic opportunities of tomorrow. In key respects we are dealing with – and often benefitting from – decisions about infrastructures made over a hundred years ago. For example, much of London’s existing sewerage network dates back to the sewers designed and installed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette in the mid-1870’s.
Investment decisions that have been made in the past inevitably shape and often constrain what can be done now, and this temporal awareness needs to underpin a more future-orientated collective judgment about investment priorities. For example, those places affected by the Beeching cuts to the UK rail network saw “falls in population in affected areas relative to less affected areas, loss of educated and skilled workers, a loss of jobs, and an aging population.” All too often, key decisions about infrastructure are made in response to immediate political and fiscal pressures, with the longer view too readily discounted and existing accounting measures unable to incorporate hypothetical benefits. HS2 provides a very striking and salutary example of this trend.
Our work in this area leads us to the view that infrastructure policy should be a much bigger part of the public conversation about regional development, governance and spatial equity in the UK. A cue could be taken from the concept of ‘infrastructural citizenship’ as outlined by urban geographer Charlotte Lemanski, as a way of understanding the role that infrastructure plays in mediating the relationship between citizens and the state. Investing in infrastructure in its widest sense is one way in which government can demonstrate its commitment to the fortunes and futures of all of its regions and cities.
About the authors
Professor Michael Kenny is inaugural Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at University of Cambridge. He served on the Leverhulme Trust’s Advisory Committee (2010-2018), was co-director of the British Academy’s “Governing England” programme (2015-2018), and is currently a visiting Fellow at the UCL Constitution Unit and a member of the advisory board of the Constitution Society. He also serves on the scientific advisory panel for the ‘Behaviour Change by Design’ project funded by the Wellcome Trust, and the Management Board of the Centre for Sustainable Leadership, and is a senior advisor to ‘The Science of Global Risk’ project funded by the Templeton Foundation.
Owen Garling is the Bennett Institute’s Knowledge Transfer Facilitator and he provides an important conduit between researchers and policymakers in the UK and internationally. With over two decades of experience of working in the public sector in and around Cambridge Owen has a particular interest in how the Bennett Institute’s work can support policymakers working at regional and local levels as well as at a national level.
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