CEW’s Infrastructure Investment and Delivery in Wales conference (4th November) was a great success; tackling head on the issues around what vision we want for Wales and the funding, long-term planning and impact of infrastructure on our communities and not just the economy.




It was great to hear Jane Hutt AM, Minister for Finance and Government Business, announce her support for the creation of a Wales Infrastructure Forum.

This will be the conduit for dialogue and partnership between industry and Government to help make sure the right infrastructure decisions and processes are agreed to maximise our chances of allowing Welsh construction to build the infrastructure required to boost the nation’s economic growth and create an opportunity for our industry to deliver landmark world class engineering and construction schemes. The next step is to collate all of the feedback from our conference and engage with all of the stakeholders from ACE, ICE and CECA to the broader construction industry groups as well as the Welsh CBI, IoD, Chambers of Commerce and public sector client bodies. This will help us shape the framework for the new Wales Infrastructure Forum that we hope will begin its work in early 2016.

Getting Welsh infrastructure right will boost the nation’s economic growth and create an opportunity for our industry to deliver landmark world class engineering and construction schemes. Wales must get this right and to do so, we need your involvement. We need your input, opinions and ideas to help us shape policy and bring the right people together in the new Wales Infrastructure Forum. Over the next few days and weeks CEW will make available the slides from the conference and we will pull together a short report summarising the outputs. But we want you to respond to these documents – please feedback to our team with your thoughts about the Vision for Wales, its importance in delivering a long term plan, the wider social benefits from major projects, budgeting, environment and taking a holistic view of what’s right for Wales and how construction can provide the answers.

If your organisation has any interest in the future of Welsh infrastructure please get involved.