Priority Action Area #4

Deliver more efficient planning, procurement and delivery

It has been widely recognised that the diversity of infrastructure assets and their supply chains, the interactions between organisations, and the physical scale of the infrastructure itself, pose significant challenges for infrastructure delivery.[56,57] Furthermore, the nature of these challenges evolves over the infrastructure life cycle, from initiation and design through procurement, delivery, operation to decommissioning or repurposing. Maximising the value from infrastructure will make it a more attractive investment proposition, but in an era of austerity there is an equally great imperative to identify opportunities across the whole infrastructure life cycle to deliver greater benefits and efficiencies. These issues are spanning larger spatial scales, such as the city-region, and posing significant challenges for local infrastructure provision.

Recommendation 11: Implementation of the Project Initiation Routemap has been shown to have many cost reduction benefits and should be made standard practise for all public funded projects.

Recommendation 12: Planning and design of infrastructure should consider the material and resource demands of infrastructure pipelines to identify opportunities for reducing waste in the construction and operation phases, whilst designing for end of life material recovery or repurposing of infrastructure.