If the mood music is to be believed, then there could be an announcement in the June Spending Review about a pipeline of new Public Private Partnerships (PPP) projects in the UK.

I’ve just spent the last three days at UKREiiF in Leeds, and I had a number of meetings where someone mentioned this. Will it happen? I’m in the camp that believes that we need some form of PPP if we are to build the infrastructure in the UK to enable our economy to grow over the next 15 years.

One of the UKREiiF sessions was titled: The Role of Private Finance in Accelerating Net Zero Transition and Future Infrastructure Investment in the UK. The panel contained many experts from infrastructure investment in the UK and abroad.  It was an interesting discussion, and some key points that came out of it included:

• It’s good for the UK Government to have policies that relate to infrastructure projects, but they must be consistently applied;
• There is a high demand for infrastructure investments with ESG covenants;
• Future PPP models can be an evolution of existing PPP models already used in the UK;
• Given the current fiscal landscape, there will be no new infrastructure built in the UK without private sector finance, reasonable risk distribution, reasonable certainty with a project pipeline and a credible government counterparty that can be relied on;
• If the model means that it could go on the UK Government’s balance sheet, then it is unlikely to be acceptable;
• We need smaller and simpler projects.

We need more social housing, more retrofit and energy projects to get to net-zero and other infrastructure built to take the UK into the next century. Everyone knows that currently the UK Government doesn’t have sufficient money to fund all of this, but there is a huge appetite among international investors to find a safe haven for their investment when there is so much uncertainty in the world. 

Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is focusing on the new government’s growth agenda, and we need energy security, so announcing a new targeted PPP pipeline in the June Spending Review will help. 

Different PPP models can be used for different sectors and different sizes of projects. One size does not fit all. While PFI has a bad reputation, there is no need for the new models to be PFI#2. There are so many existing models that have been used in the UK and around the world that it wouldn’t take long to create an acceptable form of legal documentation.

If a new PPP pipeline is announced to fund, build and maintain infrastructure in the UK, then, like in any project, make it simple, make it bankable and structure it so there is a reasonable share of risk, where the risk sits with the party that is best placed to manage it.   

Watch this space!