If you have ‘shovel-ready projects’, waste no time in putting them forward. This government is preparing to build, build, build.

“Britain can’t build anything anymore” - we hear this kind of thing in focus groups all the time.

Despite huge and understandable scepticism from Labour’s Hero Voters (Keir Cozens has written on why they matter here) about the new government’s capacity to throw up new wind turbines, deliver battery storage, erect a load of pylons and cover fields and rooftops with solar panels, there’s a quiet revolution going on in government that could be the catalyst to prove the doubters wrong.

To meet its ambitious Clean Power 2030 plan of electrifying the energy network, a new publicly owned corporation will come into existence tomorrow – the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO).

While it was inherited from the previous administration (don’t expect a chorus from the Conservatives of “not another nationalisation from Labour”), the new body has a much clearer mandate with Labour. Not least in constructing place-based plans for new energy infrastructure, as my colleague Adam Bell has pointed out here.

While of course, those decisions will sit with Ministers (and ultimately with Cabinet Ministers), recommendations from NESO are likely to influence where things get built. As ever, policy and politics will rub up to deliver a series of winner and losers.

As Adam puts it the new body will “provide a degree of granularity about where projects should be cited. For all of the debate around zonal pricing, it was always likely to provide only limited signals about where to optimally locate assets. This kind of plan can go well beyond this, directing exactly where large assets should be constructed to make best use of existing transmission”.

During a fringe event at Labour conference last week hosted by the good people of Community Union, Sarah Jones MP, Minister for Industry (who sits in both DESNZ and DBT) told the audience that the government is “looking at place very carefully… for investments in parts of the country”.

For those in Liverpool, it was hard to miss discussions about ‘shovel-ready projects’ and the need for government to move at pace in the first half of this parliament if its ambitions are to be realised.

If you have plans to build, waste no time in putting them forward to government.

At Stonehaven, we have done extensive data modelling – using our proprietary multi-level regression with post stratification (MRP) model to understand political pathways to building infrastructure at constituency level. To find out more, please get in touch.

Adam McNicholas is Senior Advisor at research and strategy consultancy Stonehaven.