Surrey Infrastructure Plan

Sustainable growth needs to be supported by infrastructure. Roads, schools, community and leisure facilities, healthcare and green space are essential for well-functioning, well-connected places and healthy communities and vital if we are to retain existing businesses and attract new ones. The 2017 Surrey Infrastructure Study indicated that delivering the necessary infrastructure to support growth planned in Surrey to 2031 was estimated to cost at least £5.51 billion with only £3.04 billion of potential funding identified.

Delivering Surrey's infrastructure needs (including addressing the identified funding gap) will be challenging in the light of austerity measures and the Government's levelling-up agenda, as well as global pressures including the COVID-19 pandemic and climate emergency and the context of a broadening scope of infrastructure, for example, relating to digital, clean energy and future mobility. The Surrey Infrastructure Plan (SIP), produced in 2020, is intended to help position SCC to respond to these infrastructure challenges.

Within the SIP there are 15 objectives which have been derived from the full range of strategies that impact on and determine the county's priorities for placemaking, from the Place Ambition, the Surrey Climate Change Strategy, the Surrey Health and Wellbeing Strategy, the Local Transport Plan, the Local Plans of the districts and boroughs, and Council's own organisational strategy. By bringing together a comprehensive set of objectives that capture the intent of this full range of strategies, the Plan will enable the Council and partners to take a truly integrated view of infrastructure that delivers not just for one agenda at a time.

The SIP includes a Prioritisation Framework tool which has been designed to enable infrastructure projects (of all scales and types) to be compared against each other individually or within packages. Projects are scored against the 15 objectives identified within the SIP as well as a further four criteria to assess the projects affordability, deliverability and level of community support. Finally, an assessment will be made of the quality of information that is available to be able to undertake the scoring for any given project. In some cases, a high level of data and information will be available whereas in other cases the project may only be at an early concept stage and very little information exists and therefore estimating or assumptions will need to be made.

The study is available to download.

Files available to download