Valuing Infrastructure Spend Supplementary: Guidance to the Green Book
This document is a best practice guide for use in central government departments and other government bodies involved in the production and approval of business cases for economic infrastructure projects. The guidance should be understood by all who are either responsible for developing and producing economic infrastructure spending proposals, or for their assessment and approval. This document is also relevant for the regulated economic infrastructure sectors, who will usually consider appraisal from the perspective of the investor and consumer.
To ensure that the UK’s economic infrastructure is able to fulfil its purpose, in facilitating the operation of our society and economy, this document supports effective decision-making in relation to infrastructure spending and interventions that involve the use of public money or have a societal impact. To do so it focuses on characteristics and impacts (or outcomes) that may be of particular relevance to infrastructure in order to maximise value for money.
- Chapter 2 presents important characteristics of infrastructure and key principles to follow in order to account for them.
The subsequent chapters focus on the implications of three of these characteristics and the impacts which may result from, or be affected by, them.
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Chapter 3: Valuing Interdependence and Resilience covers the opportunities and risks which arise due to the interactions between the infrastructure project or asset under consideration and the rest of the national infrastructure system across all sectors. It explains three means of managing interdependence, namely through improving systemic resilience,1 implementing multi-use assets and joint delivery, and implementing passive provision.2
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Chapter 4: Valuing Scale Effects covers the opportunities and risks which arise from the organisation or co-ordination of projects and programmes in such a way that their scale can result in or affect impacts.
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Chapter 5: Valuing Non-Marginal Effects covers the potential for infrastructure to support and enable economic activity and output that may not otherwise have been possible.
UK. 2015a. Valuing Infrastructure Spend: Supplementary Guidance to The Green Book. London: UK Government, HM Treasury. [#3214]
