Featured Post from Aston University

Balfour Beatty group CEO and Aston University visiting professor predicts decade of UK infrastructure growth

Apr 26, 2022

2 min



  • Leo Quinn says transport, defence and energy projects are set to benefit from potential government-funded boom
  • The UK Government has committed £4.8bn for infrastructure investment in towns across the country
  • Balfour Beatty is working on a number of projects including Hinkley Point C and HS2.


A decade of UK ‘infrastructure growth’ has been predicted by Balfour Beatty CEO and Aston University visiting professor, Leo Quinn, as the construction industry gets ready for a potential boom following financial commitments from the Government.


£4.8bn has been promised for infrastructure investment in towns across the country and £26bn for public capital investment to hit emissions targets as part of the Government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda to raise living standards in regions outside of London.


Leo Quinn said:


“If you start to look at infrastructure and you look at either HS2, you look at nuclear - in terms of defence nuclear or civil nuclear - you look at the green agenda . . . we are entering into an era of 10 years of infrastructure growth.


“I think the future looks very optimistic.”


Balfour Beatty, the UK’s largest construction group, is working on a number of projects, including Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear power station built in the UK in more than 20 years, and HS2, the high-speed rail link between London and the north of England.


Overall, the UK group and French construction company Vinci have secured about £6bn in HS2 projects as part of a joint venture.


This includes a £5bn civil engineering contract for the stretch of HS2 between Warwickshire and Staffordshire and a £1bn construction management deal for Old Oak Common station in north London, alongside engineering group Systra.


The group was also awarded a £52m contract to deliver ‘environmental works’ across the HS2 route from the West Midlands to Crewe, creating new habitats along this 64km section of track.




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3 min

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The removal of the two-child limit on benefit eligibility is obviously a key headline – long touted as a key reason larger families are much more likely to be in poverty than smaller families. This is a key change that many Labour MPs wanted to see happen and the chancellor has delivered on it. This is very welcome news – although it won’t start to affect these families until after April 2026 to give time to bring these measures into place – but then predicted to lift 450,000 children out of poverty. 2. As part of making the tax system more progressive, a brand-new tax was announced on very expensive houses in England – to be snappily called the High Value Council Tax Surcharge (or HVCTS) – although expect it to be called the ‘mansion tax’ by everyone! 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There are many smaller measures to explore, or ones that are not coming into effect for the next year or more that might have been missed from the news headlines but that will almost certainly affect lots of people. 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