Will the Government's Infrastructure Strategy make a difference?

The Government has recently released a 10 Year Infrastructure Strategy, designed to take a joined-up view to improve planning and delivery of all types of infrastructure across the UK. The public estates experts at Sewell Advisory take a look at the strategy and examine whether it will meet its aims of providing infrastructure to drive growth.

The Government’s 2025 Infrastructure Strategy arrives at a critical time when the issues within our national systems, particularly the health and education sectors, are hard to overlook. It outlines substantial investment (£720 billion in capital) and confirms more details about the role of the National Infrastructure & Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) in support of infrastructure delivery, aiming for a unified approach to economic and social infrastructure planning and delivery.

At Sewell Advisory, we believe that this strategy must not become another document on the shelf, full of ambition but left undelivered. It needs to signify a shift from reactive planning to proactive, community-led infrastructure development. In healthcare, the stakes are incredibly high.

Let’s be honest – much of the NHS estate is no longer fit for purpose. This isn’t a new revelation, but it’s one that can no longer be ignored.

Lord Darzi recently described much of the NHS estate as “crumbling” – and he’s right. Many of our hospitals were built decades ago, never intended to meet the demands of 21st-century care. From leaking roofs to outdated layouts, clinicians and patients are forced to work and recover in environments that hinder efficiency, compromise safety, and erode dignity.

It’s not just hospitals. Across the NHS, buildings are deteriorating, and technology is falling behind. Primary care, the frontline of our health system, is too often delivered from ageing, inaccessible premises that belong to a bygone era, not the digitally connected, integrated future patients deserve.

The £6 billion earmarked annually for hospital maintenance is a vital starting point- but it only scratches the surface of the under-recognised strain on primary care facilities, where most people interact with the NHS first, and where prevention and early intervention should happen.

Investing here is crucial if we are serious about delivering the Government’s ‘three shifts’: from sickness to prevention, analogue to digital and hospital to community. Without modern, accessible primary care infrastructure, the first shift – sickness to prevention – risks remaining an ambition rather than becoming reality.

The challenges of an ageing, no longer fit for purpose estate are, of course, not limited to the health sector. In January 2023, the NAO reported that following years of underinvestment, the overall condition of the education estate was declining and around 700,000 pupils were learning in schools that need major rebuilding or refurbishment.

This was a confirmation of the prediction made in their 2017 report that the school estate’s overall condition was expected to worsen as buildings in poor, but not the worst, condition deteriorated further because of a significant gap between available funding and what is needed.

The report concluded that the DfE needed to do more and faster to address these issues highlighting that using the scarce funding for urgent repairs rather than planned maintenance did not offer value for money.

Aside from making sure our schools are “safe, dry and warm” – the bare minimum our young people should expect from their learning environments – there are countless more schools that, owing to age or design trends at their time of construction, simply do not reflect the way education is delivered in 2025.

Just this week, the DfE released their 2025 census data indicating that the upwards trajectory of pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) in our schools is showing no signs of slowing. Almost 20% of the school population have SEND, with the number of pupils having an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) having doubled since 2016. This is having a dramatic impact on our school estates, with both DfE and local authorities unable to keep up with the demand for places in specialist settings, driving a policy shift to deliver more inclusive mainstream settings to cater for a wider range of need. But when schools are struggling just to heat and repair their existing buildings as they are, where does the funding to make these much-needed adaptations come from?

Given this context, the new £9 billion annual maintenance fund, which covers hospitals, courts, prisons, schools and colleges, is a welcome step toward beginning to address the scale of extensive backlog challenges. But delivering outcomes will depend on targeted, informed investment. And let’s not forget that we are still planning blind and often in a vacuum. The ERIC datasets still fail to capture the full picture of primary care estates. Local authorities are projecting their pupil place requirements and highlighting potential over capacity without being able to look beyond their four walls for a more efficient or effective use of this space. Without accurate, integrated data, how can we make informed decisions about where and how to invest?

Sewell Advisory, as a system partner familiar with the estate on the ground, has the skills and expertise to help plug these data gaps, ensuring decisions are not just evidence-based, but community-informed.

The strategy’s commitment to place-based planning is not just good policy – it is common sense. You cannot separate a GP surgery from the neighbourhood it serves. You cannot design a school or hospital in isolation from housing, transport, or population trends.

At Sewell Advisory, we have spent years embedded in this complexity. We have worked on social infrastructure from the inside – investing in and developing facilities that are not just functional, but flexible and community-rooted.

Our estate strategies and business cases do not stop at the site boundary. We look at:

• Local housing developments and how they shape demand.
• Transport connectivity and its role in access to care.
• Existing services, such as health, education and social care, and how they intersect.

And with robust mapping tools, we bring the kind of foresight and integration this new strategy will demand.

Having a national strategy is a good thing. It shows that government recognises infrastructure as a driver of social cohesion and economic productivity.

But plans do not deliver outcomes – people do. And right now, the public sector and its partners are stretched thin.

So what will it take?

• We need decision-makers who see the public sector and all it component parts, not as standalone services, but as part of a local ecosystem.
• Investment must align with broader national aims: levelling up, net-zero, digital transformation, inclusion, and health equity.
• The renewed push for PPPs cannot be a repeat of the past. We need smarter, more transparent models – ones that bring innovation and accountability in equal measure.
• A pipeline of projects that are ready to go and are not stuck in concept stage, but shaped by real-world needs, data, and community voices.

Sewell Advisory stands ready. With our experience across healthcare, education and community infrastructure, we bring more than technical expertise. We bring perspective. A grounded understanding of what it takes to move from ambition to delivery, from capital allocation to community impact.

We are energised and excited to explore the art of the possible with our many partners and customers, drawing on our extensive track record and deep experience in social infrastructure.

Let’s not waste this moment.