As part of a series of video interviews with industry leaders working in the infrastructure sector, we interviewed Cathy Travers, Development Director – Europe, UK and Africa at Mott MacDonald, a global engineering, management and development consultancy.
Cathy discusses how to improve the delivery process, the pros and cons of devolution and the importance of engaging young people in the decision-making process. Listen to what she says in this video.
Video transcript
If you had £1 billion to invest in infrastructure, what would you invest it in and why? (0:07 – 0:25)
If you gave me a billion pounds I'd invest it in the north of England and I'd invest it in east-west connectivity. That would help us move goods around, it would help us move people around faster, but also help us connect our ideas and our thinking better and all of that would benefit our economy.
Where are the biggest bottlenecks for infrastructure delivery? (0:26 – 1:04)
The bottlenecks to the industry are about the visibility of the pipeline of projects and also the volume of that pipeline of projects. I think that we can do more to create better visibility, to actually generate more projects as well and create more and more investments.
To deliver more infrastructure faster and better, I think that we need the public and private sector to collaborate across the whole supply chain so that we are always putting forward the best people, the best skills to deliver for UK.
What are the pros and cons of devolution of UK infrastructure delivery? (1:05 – 1:45)
The pros and cons of the devolution in UK infrastructure industry I think are that you get greater autonomy at a local level, better decision making. We can deliver more projects in parallel rather than one after another which means that we can actually speed up delivery.
I think on the downside... actually the capacity to deliver at a local level and deliver one-off projects may mean that we wouldn't get as good a quality project. I think knowledge sharing across the regions is going to be massively important to ensure that we deliver real quality infrastructure.
Attracting top leadership talent and engaging young people in decision-making (1:46 – 2:47)
We need the right skills to deliver the national infrastructure plan.
We need to do better scenario planning about what capacity we need for the future but not only capacity... the skills that we're going to need in the future are going to be very different to what we need today. We need to plan now to make sure that we get the right people.
We need top leadership talent within the infrastructure sector and to attract them we've got to make it seem a really exciting job and it is a fantastic sector to work in.
As well as attracting the top talent, we've got to really pull through the emerging talent as well. We've got to engage more young people in our infrastructure decision-making. They've got some great ideas and they've got really different ways of doing things and probably better ways of doing things... so we've really got to harness that power, listen to what they've got to say to us and give them a voice within the industry and really act upon some of those new changing ideas that they're bringing forward.
For more perspectives on infrastructure, read our industry report featuring 13 in-depth interviews with industry leaders and key decision makers in the infrastructure sector.