Every civilisation that mattered built things. Rome had its roads, Victorian Britain its railways, post-war France its projets d'envergure.

A state that builds is a state that endures. A state that dithers, is one that falters. We currently treat infrastructure as a spreadsheet line item rather than a national mission and have become a state managing its own decline. 

We are a country that once electrified the world, built the globe’s railways, but now unable to electrify a railway line between its second and third cities without a decade of consultation and a graveyard of cancelled schemes. The problem is not expertise. Our engineers and consultants remain among the finest in the world. The problem is not money, or at least not only money. The problem is government.  

There is no single place in government where infrastructure lives. It is scattered across the Department for Transport, DESNZ, DEFRA, MHCLG and the Treasury, each with its own priorities, its own timescales, its own definition of what matters.  

That is why ACE is calling for something both radical and obvious: a dedicated Department for Infrastructure. One department. One Secretary of State. One pipeline. A single point of accountability for the roads, rails, grids, reservoirs and digital networks on which every other national ambition depends. 

This department could end the fragmentation in infrastructure delivery. The stop-start commissioning cycles that drain the supply chain of skills and confidence. The show of energy policy pulling one way while water policy pulls another. The absurdity of a ten-year infrastructure strategy administered by departments working to five-year spending reviews and two-year political horizons.  

Growth and security are the fundamental basic tenements of a government. Infrastructure is the delivery mechanism for that mission. It deserves a department with its name on the door. 

And if we are going to build this department, we should not build it in Whitehall. 

We have written to Andy Burnham making precisely this case. The regions are not supplicants waiting for London's favour. They are where the infrastructure challenge is most acute and where the appetite to solve it is strongest. Greater Manchester has spent a decade proving that devolved, joined-up delivery works, from the Bee Network to its housing and regeneration pipeline.

A Department for Infrastructure headquartered in the regions would not be a symbolic gesture. It would be a statement that the era of dictated the fate of the regions from a desk in SW1 is over. 

It should not be the case that Leeds is without a tram network. It’s European counterpart, Hannover, has almost exactly the same population as Leeds within 10km of the centre, and its tram-metro network serves around 200 stations. A German city the same size with 200 stations versus Leeds with none is the kind of contrast that shows the infrastructure deficit in Britain and how its growth has suffered.  

When Great British Railways needed a home, the government did not simply default to London. It ran a competition. Towns and cities across the country made their case, argued their heritage, their connectivity, their talent base. Derby won, and in winning gained not just jobs but identity, a stake in the national project. The competition itself was a act of civic renewal.  

Do the same for the Department for Infrastructure. Open it up. Let Birmingham make its case as the crossroads of the nation. Let Manchester argue its devolution pedigree. Let Leeds, Newcastle, Cardiff and Glasgow compete to host the department that will shape the physical fabric of Britain for the next half century.  

The fragmentation of infrastructure responsibility is not a cosmetic flaw, it is the root cause of the delays, cost overruns and cancellations that have made Britain a byword for failing to build. You cannot deliver a fifty-year pipeline through a fifty-way split of responsibility. 

Our members design and deliver this country's infrastructure, and they tell us the same thing every time. Give us certainty. Give us a pipeline. Give us one owner in government. A Department for Infrastructure does all three. 

Rome built roads. The Victorians built railways. Create the DfI. Put it in the regions. And then get building.  

Click here to read the full ACE letter to Andy Burnham.