Future Infrastructure Leaders Forum calls for rethink to unlock innovation and tackle cross-sector barriers

The Infrastructure Rewired report is the culmination of a 12-month programme involving the next generation of leaders from the UK’s most prominent infrastructure owners, developers and advisers.

During the programme, which is convened and chaired by business advisory firm PwC, participants were asked to respond to four questions set by the government and industry to gauge how to tackle the biggest challenges facing the UK infrastructure sector today.

The questions posed were: why so few major programmes meet their planned budget, schedule or benefits; how the infrastructure sector can shift approach to become a leader in innovative tech solutions and AI adoption; how the UK can better manage renewal and upgrade of existing infrastructure; and how government decision-making and delivery structures can be improved to address the obstacles of integrated place-making.

The report identifies 12 main recommendations to “rewire” how the sector faces the challenges of project delivery, technology adoption, asset renewal and place-making.

On project delivery, the report outlines that organisational development should be prioritised from the outset, arguing that clients should be prepared to invest early in “developing requirements and design alongside the leadership, culture, capability and technology required for delivery, testing both rigorously before major commitments are made.”

The forum found that too often the programme leads the project to the detriment of the organisation which sits at the heart of its delivery. To facilitate this cultural shift, the report recommends that client organisations should be prepared to adopt a strategic approach, by increasing the proportion of directly employed staff within core delivery functions, arguing that people and organisational strategy should be central to the initial programme design.

The forum was also asked why the infrastructure sector has failed to adopt technological innovation successfully to date. The report states that the rigidity of the current procurement system within the infrastructure sector is stifling innovation since it gives bidders “less latitude” to offer an alternative approach.

The commercial incentives of the supply chain are pitted against innovation and so, where appropriate, the forum recommended that government and industry should “replace labour-based pricing and prescriptive procurement” with “outcome-based commercial models that share risk and reward those who deliver greater productivity through technology”.

Acknowledging that supply chains for major infrastructure projects are often multi-layered and complex, the report also recommends that businesses should first establish their technology strategy, common data architecture and contractual requirements to support open, interoperable data.

The report also reiterates a recommendation from last year’s forum to pool public and private innovation funding into an independent ‘infra-tech’ fund. However, respondents said such investment must be accompanied by organisational and commercial reforms if they are to be rolled out successfully across the sector.    

Ross Corser, a planning expert who represented Pinsent Masons on the 2026 forum, said: “There is a consistent theme which runs through the report – infrastructure performance depends on capable institutions. Thin and federated client organisations struggle to sustain culture, accountability and corporate memory. By insourcing people, skills, culture and technology, clients would be better able to drive forward challenging programmes, change cultural aversion to risk and invest in new innovative ways to deliver projects, hand-in-hand with the supply chain”.

When asked how the UK can better manage the renewal and upgrade of its current assets and aging infrastructure, forum leaders stressed there was an underlying need to make the investment case for stewardship of existing infrastructure. The public are less inclined to accept significant spend on asset renewal when the result of that investment is the same service as they had before. The value of asset renewal is only obvious to the public when the service fails, which leads the industry to a crisis-led mindset of ‘fix-on-fail’.

The forum called on the government, industry and research bodies to rethink how they approach investment in infrastructure and recommended that asset owners should adopt industry-wide asset-health standards, interoperable data, sensor-based monitoring and analytical models linking conditions to service potential risk. This step-change in approach will also require operators to be more transparent and consistent in their reporting on the existing condition of their assets, on resilience outcomes and the long-term consequences of deferred renewal or existing infrastructure upgrades.

The report recommends that infrastructure operators report clearly and consistently on the long-term consequences of deferred renewal to create a more informed public debate about cost, risk and service reliability. Intervention must be driven by risk rather than crisis, which inevitably produces lower costs and better outcomes to the public.

Finally, the report also addresses obstacles to delivering genuinely integrated place-based projects and programmes to deliver local economic growth and new housing and how government decision-making and delivery structures can be improved to address these. With devolution a hot topic of discussion, this was a timely question.

Leaders recommended that the government should establish “a place-based delivery forum for major programmes”, which would bring together government, infrastructure owners, investors and industry to resolve cross-sector barriers, share lessons from successful schemes and accelerate the adoption of effective delivery models.

Place is experienced as a whole but is rarely planned, funded or delivered as a single thing and responsibility for place is rarely a coherent picture, with often nobody singularly responsible for the place as a whole or delivering place-based outcomes. To achieve this, the forum recommends the appointment of named “convenors”, supported by the National Infrastructure Service Transformation Authority (NISTA), to act as the central conduit to bring together key stakeholders before business cases and planning processes constraint options. This would typically be the master developer, but it could be a major transport body or a key stakeholder in the place.

The forum also recommended that long-term success of major place-based programmes will often hinge on their ability to develop integrated funding and sequencing strategies from the outset, to provide clarity on how projects will be financed, who is responsible for the cost of growth and how risk and value is shared.

Commenting on the recommendations, Robbie Owen, infrastructure planning and government affairs expert at Pinsent Masons, said: “The report tackles head-on some of the key challenges facing the UK infrastructure sector and tries to come up with some bold answers to help address them. From adopting new procurement strategies and encouraging the interoperability of technology architecture between organisations in the supply chain, to establishing national level place-based delivery forums to share lessons learnt across industry, there is no shortage of ambition to face the inter-generational challenges before us.”

Owen said the question now is whether industry and the government have the necessary “courage to continue these conversations and drive forward the innovation and change the sector sorely needs”.