Infrastructure investment plan 2021-22 to 2025-26: lessons learned

5. Context: Review of Key Documents

To provide some context, this chapter refers to a selection of relevant documents that have been highlighted by focus groups participants.

The Auditor General wrote to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee (February 2025), setting out what he would expect to see in the upcoming draft Climate Change Plan (CCP) “to ensure it is credible and includes the information required to support effective scrutiny of progress and performance”. Some of the issues raised included:

• using accessible language and explaining all technical terms.
• a clear line of sight between the five-year carbon budget and the policies and interventions that will contribute towards its delivery, “So, the plan may need to consider the intended outcomes and cost of each policy and include enough information to support scrutiny.”

As well as specific information on greenhouse gas emission, and the policies to deliver, the plan would also need information on:

• Timescales
• Roles and responsibilities
• Costs
• Measures and Indicators, and
• Governance

An Audit Scotland briefing (2023) on Investing in Scotland’s infrastructure, made a number of recommendations including, that the Scottish Government should:

• Produce clear information that explains how it decided to prioritise, delay, or cancel projects and programmes in its Infrastructure Strategy. This should be published at the same time as its updated capital spending review.
• Provide clear and regular information, through its six-monthly major capital projects update and annual progress reports, on how its infrastructure investment decisions support wider government goals such as addressing inequalities and tackling climate change.
• Ensure that its public reporting on infrastructure projects allows consistent monitoring of individual projects and programmes, including the benefits associated with them and where costs or timescales have increased.
• Move swiftly towards delivering its commitment to producing a public sector account for Scotland that reports on the assets and liabilities of the whole devolved public sector in Scotland.

As mentioned by some focus groups participants, the UK Government produced a working paper on its own plans for a 10 year Infrastructure strategy (January 2025), and set out its aims as follows:

The Strategy seeks to reduce uncertainty by bringing together a long-term plan for the country’s social, economic, and housing infrastructure. The Strategy will also set out an institutional framework to support its implementation, including setting out the role of public financial institutions such as the National Wealth Fund and how the Strategy will support other strategies, such as the industrial strategy. The Strategy sits at the heart of the government’s growth mission and will seek to drive growth and productivity through providing stability and certainty to the market on the long-term plan for infrastructure.

The overarching objective of the Strategy is to set out what the public can expect from infrastructure services and provide certainty to industry on the government’s priorities for infrastructure.

Some focus groups participants expressed a desire that infrastructure information be “live,” and able to be interrogated rather than “flat.” As one example the Infrastructure and Projects Authority PFI Dashboard provides opportunities to investigate PFI projects.

CoST is an international Infrastructure Transparency Initiative (CoST) and describes itself as “one of the leading global non-profits improving transparency, participation and accountability in infrastructure.” CoST reported (2024) research, that was published in July 2018, found that “Scotland disclosed significant levels of data for projects with a threshold above £20 million in line with CoST infrastructure data standard but less for projects below this threshold. Moreover, the data was scattered across various systems and sites which made it hard to access and make sense of.”

Focus groups participants also referred to research for the (UK) National Infrastructure Commission (summarised here by the Institute for Civil Engineers, October 2024). The report found that one of the root causes (of increased costs of infrastructure) is “a lack of clear strategic direction.” This included, more specifically that:

• Many factors are important, but the role of government in setting clear strategic direction is “foundational.”
• The lack of stable policy making has been a particular problem under recent governments.
• It means there’s no long-term strategy, pipeline, or funding commitments for infrastructure projects.
• The supply chain needs that certainty to have the confidence to invest in skills and materials.
• And other opportunities to drive down costs are missed. These include the benefits of a more programmatic pipeline, which would enable repeatability, standardisation, and lower unit costs.