WIREDGOV

Infrastructure makes our society function effectively.

Our roads, railways and buses enable people to get around for work or leisure and connect businesses with their customers. Our energy infrastructure powers homes. Broadband fibre and mobile networks bring the online world to us instantly.

As government’s independent adviser on long term infrastructure planning, the Commission has a unique perspective on this relationship between people, places and infrastructure.

We need to understand the technological advances, demands and challenges that will shape future infrastructure – but we also need to understand the society it will serve.

Reflecting a changing society

The UK’s population is growing. Our communities are becoming more diverse and social attitudes are evolving and working patterns and industries are changing.

As a public body, if we don’t recommend approaches that support the needs of that changing society, then we won’t build a strong legacy.

In fact, we set ourselves up to fail.

In response, we’ve been changing the way we work. Our new Equity, Diversity and Inclusion statement shows the progress we’re making.

And I’m delighted the Commission is also backing the Infrastructure Diversity Charter being developed by Infrastructure Matters with leaders from a broad range of companies, contractors and projects to drive positive change throughout the sector.

Publishing early next year, it aims to ensure a focus on equity, diversity and inclusion becomes a strategic asset for the industry.

The goal is to embed diversity good practices in the day-to-day work of the industry, enabling individuals and organisations to deliver the same sort of transformative change as we’ve witnessed in the sector’s health and safety performance.

The Charter, for instance, recognises the importance of a more diverse sector to tackling the critical skills shortage which could otherwise undermine the government’s growth mission.

That means making the industry more attractive as a career choice to a wider range of individuals who might overlook it or, worse, join and then leave soon after.

The Commission has since 2020 committed to changing how we recruit and nurture talent in-house, to build a more representative team.

And I’m pleased that, as our statement shows, we’ve met our goal of employing more female staff and those from minority ethnic backgrounds.

But there’s more to do. Such as thinking about how we can support people with a disability and the skills we need to join our team. The new statement shows we have a plan to address this.

These are important steps forward which can support meaningful change in the work we do.

New perspectives

After all, a more representative Commission also helps us to understand the perspectives of the diverse communities and groups who use infrastructure, and so better answer two important questions: What outcomes do we want from infrastructure; and how do we make infrastructure policy development more inclusive in support of that?

That’s important because the voices of marginalised groups haven’t always featured in infrastructure planning. That can have a material impact in the way complex decisions are made.

For instance, the expansion of dedicated cycle lanes in cities is helping reduce congestion and encourage active travel.

But cycling to work is not always an option for people with mobility issues or parents, who might be more likely to rely on buses.

That’s not an argument to stop building cycle lanes.

But by having as broad a range of perspectives on this and other tough questions, we’re better placed to understand the trade-offs inherent in answering them, and adapt our thinking in response.

Working differently

For NIA2 we talked to groups representing different communities, age groups, regions and disabilities to give us confidence that when we responded to tough policy choices, we did so in the fairest way possible.

Challenge panels also now ensure our policy process is more inclusive.

And we’ve made sure the data on which we base our recommendations is sufficiently robust to allow for more inclusive solutions to arise.

For example, we applied distributional analysis to every recommendation, expanding the story the data could tell us about how our policies would help different parts of the population.

As well as impacts on income groups, we considered what our recommendations would mean based on region, people’s gender, ethnicity and other factors, and how these shaped the way people used infrastructure.

In other words, it made us stop and challenge our assumptions.

Sometimes it reinforced them. At other times, it encouraged us to think again, for instance by shaping our advice on the need for government to support lower income households through the transition to low carbon heat.

In transport too, a narrow approach to defining ‘good’ – focused on journey times and capacity – meant we risked overlooking the needs of very specific groups of transport users.

So by taking a broader range of factors into consideration – such as user safety, affordability, and accessibility – we developed a more inclusive idea of connectivity.

From spring 2025, we’re merging with the Infrastructure and Projects Authority to become the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, and we are determined that its work will build upon these and other steps we’re already taking.

Change often comes slowly in infrastructure. But completing the work of becoming a more inclusive and mindful organisation is something we can achieve swiftly.

We intend to do so.