The CBI held a workshop in early February to provide the Bank with a platform to test emerging thinking around clean energy, transport, digital, water, and waste infrastructure investment.
The Bank is looking at investment challenges, including:
- Floating off-shore wind
- EV charging infrastructure and giga-factories
- Capacity shortfalls in broadband and 5G roll-out
- CCUS
- Water catchments
- Sustainable aviation fuels.
The Bank’s team were keen to hear business views regarding the discussion paper on where it can best deploy its £8billion of private sector capital and £10billion of government guarantees to crowd-in private sector finance and looked at your input on whether the Bank has picked the right unique selling point, and whether it has identified the right signs of market failures in their five priority sectors.
The Bank identified that it could act as an aggregator and create scale for investment – meanwhile where the government is directly funding infrastructure, such as road works, there is less of a case for private sector investment. However, the Bank signalled that it may be open for opportunities like this in future.
The workshop covered a range of challenges including:
- How the bank will manage and measure impact in achieving Levelling Up and net zero
- The potential risks of crowding out instead of crowding in private capital in areas such as digital
- The Bank’s capacity, given staff are still being recruited and the number of requests are already extremely high
- The Bank’s limited capitalisation and reliance on profitability, with attendees sighting concerns around the Bank’s decisions not being bold enough to achieve its ambitious goals
The CBI will continue to work with the Bank to ensure the views of industry are at the heart of investment. The Banks’s future Strategic Plan is likely to be reviewed annually, and your business insight is key to shape new policy.
Members can also put forward projects to the Bank by filling a form on their website.
For further information about our work on infrastructure finance please contact Kate.