Last edited 16 May 2019

Infrastructure UK (IUK)

Note: As of 1st January 2016 this unit was merged with the Major Projects Authority to become the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.

Infrastructure UK was a government unit made up of civil servants and private sector commercial experts based in HM Treasury in Whitehall. Its role was to co-ordinate and simplify the planning and prioritisation of long-term infrastructure and to secure private sector infrastructure investment.

In 2013 it stated that its priorities were to:

Improve the economic infrastructure sectors of energy, transport, waste, flood, science, water and telecoms.
Work on the government’s top 40 projects identified in the National Infrastructure Plan.
Secure £200 billion of investment over the next 5 years, the majority of which will come from the private sector.
Support major infrastructure projects where there is capital investment from the public sector.

It also had responsibilities for the UK Guarantees scheme, introduced to avoid delays to investment in UK infrastructure.

The UK’s first National Infrastructure Plan was developed by Infrastructure UK and published in October 2010. The plan was created to tackle the UK’s historically fragmented infrastructure development programmes which tend to be ineffective at prioritising need, instead only reacting to failures. The plan was intended to provide a clear, long-term strategy for maintaining and improving infrastructure, enabling the UK to remain competitive and to accommodate an increasing population.

Alongside the plan, the government published a forward programme or ‘pipeline’ of infrastructure projects to provide the ‘…transparency and certainty, which will help businesses plan and give investors confidence.’ The National Infrastructure Pipeline is published along with the Government Construction Pipeline.