Attitudes to Infrastructure in Brexit Britain

Summary

What do leave voters want from the government’s infrastructure revolution?

The UK is going through a moment of change. The election result indicated an ushering in of a new era. Austerity is making way for a post-Brexit country where nations, regions, constituencies and voters outside London and the South East play a greater role in political discourse. At no point in a generation have communities across the UK played such a central role in government direction.

The 2019 election debate was dominated by Brexit and infrastructure, and how transformative forces can deliver change in seemingly forgotten parts of the UK.People who voted to leave the EU in 2016 did so partly because of frustration with Europe, but also in response to the sense that communities have been left behind.Government now wants to take action and the public is expecting to see results. The additional £100bn investment that has been promised for new infrastructure to reconnect and revitalise towns and cities to address the gap between the urban areas and the rest of the UK is central to government policy. But this leaves a number of questions:

• How is government going to use infrastructure to show that Brexit can make a real difference to people’s lives?
• What kind of infrastructure do people who voted to leave want? The vote leave demographic is one of the biggest constituencies and holds enormous power in the UK, having dominated the last election. What does this group really want?
• How is infrastructure going to address their concerns and how should the industry build support amongst this demographic?
• What does the confluence of Brexit and infrastructure tell us about the UK in the 2020s? In this report, Copper Consulting set out to consider these questions to bring insight to the infrastructure sector.