The Infrastructure Podcast: Episode 77

Guest:  Alex Gilbert, managing director, Amey Consulting

Building growth by solving problems

We're back from a summer week off and in today's podcast we talk about how the engineering sector can support the new Labour government’s ambition to roll out infrastructure investment at pace and drive growth back into the UK economy.

There can be no doubt about the new government’s infrastructure ambitions following the recent King’s Speech which unequivocally placed investment in the nation’s energy, transport, water and communication infrastructure at the heart of economic growth

But how will this ambition be translated into reality? How will the industry need to change to ensure that we maximise the outcomes from every hard-earned pound of public and private cash? Cash that is far from abundant.

Without question the industry has to change and in particular the traditional role of design focused businesses must evolve to meet the new demands of infrastructure clients – and of the businesses and public that they serve – to focus on boosting the outcomes that they deliver.

To help me with this challenge, my guest today is Alex Gilbert, managing director of Amey Consulting, the design and problem solving wing of infrastructure service provider Amey, which, now freed from the shackles of its long term own Ferrovial, is now reshaping its strategy and its culture under new private equity ownership. 

Alex has his hands full as he attempts to leverage the firm’s traditional engineering and design skills and add in a raft of new talents, ideas and technologies to help generate not just greater efficiency from their infrastructure investment, but meet this new challenge of fundamentally shifting the quality and value of the outcomes that this investment achieves. 

All of which is, of course, crucial to delivering the ambitions demanded by his public and private sector clients but also to meeting the growth and value uplift demanded by the team at Buckthorn Partners, Amey’s new private equity owners.

Let’s find out more.

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