KPMG brult om projecten in de UK om te investeren.
UK lacks ‘investment-ready’ infrastructure projects, financiers warn
25 February, 2015 | By Lucy Mair
A lack of suitable schemes is deterring overseas funders from backing projects in the government’s National Infrastructure Plan, investors have warned.
UK Trade and Investment managing director Michael Boyd told a conference in London that “the lack of investment-ready projects” is the biggest challenge when it comes to attracting foreign investment.
Mr Boyd said: “There is plenty of money out there. Give me a viable project that is ready to go – I have got people queuing up.
“But what we have not got is investible projects at the moment.”
The UK has an infrastructure pipeline with a total public and private investment value of £466bn, according to the latest NIP.
Also speaking at the 2015 UK Infrastructure & Finance Summit, hosted by KPMG, Julia Prescott, chief strategy officer at global investor and asset manager Meridiam, echoed Mr Boyd’s sentiment.
She said her firm was “very keen to invest in the UK, but we are not seeing a large amount of opportunity”.
“Where are the projects?” she asked. “In France we are financing two high-speed rail lines, but the private sector has been kept out of HS2.”
Ms Prescott said the UK had “fallen out of love with private finance in transport and social infrastructure”.
“A lot of it is political – a new administration coming in wanted to be different, so any private investment in those sides was bad.
“And with all the furore over PFI, the industry did not do much to counter that.”
Two-thirds of the infrastructure pipeline will be financed by the private and regulated sectors, according to Infrastructure UK chief executive Geoffrey Spence, although transport projects such as HS2 will be largely publicly funded and there is little scope for project finance across the pipeline.
Aberdeen Asset Management senior investment manager Bill Haughey said investors had tried to work with the government to identify the right types of projects for private investment.
“On PF2 (private finance 2) we geared up, but we have not seen anything,” Mr Haughey said.
“We think we know where the government is going with something, and then they do not.”
London’s deputy mayor for transport and co-chair of the London Infrastructure Delivery Board Isabel Dedring said there was a need for a “different type of private sector involvement in private finance”.
She said the relationships and dialogue between the public sector and private investors needed to improve, with financial backers getting involved at an earlier stage of projects.
“Crossrail 2 is working out what the ideal route is, but the finance question only comes in when the route is agreed.
“We are not going to get large-scale grant hand-outs [for Crossrail 2].
“Crossrail 1 missed a major trick in not tapping into land values in the funding structure.”
Ms Dedring said Crossrail 2 did not yet know the best way to capture land value uplift to finance the project and called for more collaboration with private investors.
“We are not best placed to come up with financing, we do not have that skillset in house.
“We are doing our best to figure that out [but] there needs to be a better way of bringing in the private sector.”