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The Wales Infrastructure Investment Strategy is a step forwards in providing a long-term, outcome-focused direction
However, the Welsh Government needs to give more thought to delivering wider benefits across investment areas and strengthen how it manages programmes and projects.
The Welsh Government plans to spend around £3.4 billion on infrastructure in 2025-26. Investment in infrastructure delivers new or improved assets like schools, hospitals and flood defences. The way public bodies plan and deliver those investments can also secure additional economic, social, environmental, and cultural benefits.
In December 2021, the Welsh Government published the ten-year Wales Infrastructure Investment Strategy (WIIS), as well as the supporting three-year Infrastructure Finance Plan (IFP) for 2022-23 to 2024-25. We found that the WIIS is a step forwards and provides longer-term direction focused on 16 strategic outcomes, rooted in the well-being of future generations.
However, the Welsh Government needs to do more to ensure that departments are maximising their contributions to those outcomes. Many investment areas’ intended contributions seem unambitious. On average, investment areas identified expected contributions to just three of the 16 strategic outcomes, with some only one.
We found that the Welsh Government needs to do more to embed the WIIS’ outcomes into its wider framework for programme and project management, which has various other weaknesses. And while the Welsh Government’s approach to evaluation uses good practice principles, it has not been applied consistently and overall outcomes are unclear.
The report encourages the Welsh Government to provide more certainty through longer-term financial planning for infrastructure investment. However, we recognise that the Welsh Government faces some challenges when setting longer-term financial plans, such as its funding being set through UK budget cycles and the constraints of the Senedd electoral cycle. The Welsh Government set a one-year IFP for 2025-26, pending the UK Government spending review in June 2025, and is considering its options for future IFPs.
The report makes 11 recommendations for improvement in the areas set out above as well as strengthening public reporting of progress against the WIIS.
The £3 billion plus a year that the Welsh Government spends on infrastructure is significant. It is good to see the WIIS focus on getting more impact from public infrastructure – not least following a period where inflation and cost pressures have squeezed capital budgets. However, these benefits will not magically materialise. It needs a concerted effort to line up the machinery of government – baking these benefits into plans from the outset and ensuring they are delivered over the longer-term. These issues are within the Welsh Government’s gift to put right but rely on a sustained improvement in programme and project management that has not been achieved to date.