Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with reference to the paragraph 3.26 of the Office for Budget Responsibility's Economic and fiscal outlook - March 2023, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of that report's findings that cumulative UK Infrastructure Bank outlays between 2022-23 and 2025-26 will be 37 per cent lower than the initial estimate.
The UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB) was launched in June 2021 to increase investment into infrastructure and to tackle climate change and support regional and local economic growth across the UK.
In its first Strategic Plan in summer 2022, UKIB set out that, subject to the pipeline of investible projects in each year, it aims to deploy up to £3 billion of debt and equity and £2.5 billion of guarantees a year, committing its initial £22 billion of financial capacity over five to eight years.
To date, UKIB have announced 15 deals in total, investing approximately £1.4 billion and unlocking over £6 billion in private capital and supported over 4,700 jobs.