UK: Chancellor’s Budget to Strengthen Green Investment Bank

The Association for Consultancy and Engineering has called on the Chancellor to use his budget to strengthen the green economy and expand the role of the Green Investment Bank. The UK is a world leader in offshore wind and the opportunity to maintain and enhance this position must be taken.

With the welcome publication of a project pipeline in the National Infrastructure Plan, and with the imminent launch of the Green Investment Bank, the issue of funding projects is now crucial. With a growing need to establish a better partnership between the public and private sector to manage risk and deliver projects, there is scope for expanding the role of the Green Investment Bank.

ACE chief executive, Nelson Ogunshakin, OBE, said: “The establishment of the Green Investment Bank should help to deliver infrastructure projects. However, the scale of the investment challenge greatly exceeds the current resource commitment.

“It is also essential that the bank’s remit gives it enough latitude to facilitate development in partnership with private investment. This should be examined as the government works with industry to build a smarter approach to managing risk ensuring cohesive delivery across sectors.”

Green investment is an area the UK needs to prioritise if it is to meet the carbon targets it has set. The recent Vivid Economics reports prepared for the Department of Business Innovation and Skills revealed that, by 2020, green capital needs are likely to increase by four to six times their present annual level of £6bn to £8bn per year. The scale of this is demonstrated by the same reports which note that current annual UK green investment needs exceed the total value of EU-wide European Investment Bank loans over three years.

In order to support this, ACE has used its budget submission to call for a roadmap to expanding the Green Investment Bank’s remit, and to support moves to enable it to explore innovative funding methods to encourage private sector investment.

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Offshore WIND Staff, March 14, 2012