CIHT broadly welcomes the Strategy’s long-term, outcome-focused and place-based approach, particularly its alignment with Scotland’s 30‑year Needs Assessment. However, the Institution emphasises that greater clarity is needed on how transport networks are embedded as critical enabling infrastructure across all sectors.

Strengthening the role of transport

CIHT highlights the central role of transport in shaping places, supporting accessibility, enabling modal shift, and delivering social value. The response calls for transport user needs, operational performance, and asset management to be more clearly integrated alongside high-level strategic outcomes.

The Institution also stresses the importance of:

• Clearer links between long‑term strategy, funding decisions, and delivery
• Improved data integration and monitoring of transport performance and outcomes
• Greater visibility of investment pipelines to support confidence across the sector

Resilience and asset management

A key theme in CIHT’s response is the need for a stronger and more explicit focus on resilience. The Institution notes that infrastructure planning must account for both planned and reactive resilience, ensuring networks can respond effectively to unforeseen events while remaining sustainable over time.

CIHT also calls for whole‑life costing, improved asset management, and sustained investment in maintaining existing infrastructure, recognising that long-term performance depends as much on upkeep as on new delivery.

Governance, funding, and delivery

CIHT identifies opportunities to improve the effectiveness of infrastructure investment through changes to governance and planning processes, including:

• Closer integration between transport, land use planning, housing, and environmental policy
• Strengthened appraisal frameworks that better capture social, accessibility, health, and environmental outcomes
• Longer‑term funding certainty to support maintenance and smaller‑scale, high‑impact interventions

Procurement and evaluation are also highlighted as critical levers for improving outcomes, supporting innovation, and ensuring learning from completed schemes informs future investment.

Place-based investment and community involvement

While supporting a place-based approach to infrastructure investment, CIHT cautions that national spatial priorities must be balanced to avoid disadvantaging rural and island communities. The response notes that fragmented partnership structures and capacity pressures can limit the ability of some local authorities to plan and deliver complex programmes effectively.

CIHT also supports greater community involvement in infrastructure decision making, emphasising the importance of inclusive, continuous engagement throughout the project lifecycle to ensure accessibility, social value, and long-term public benefit.

Supporting sustainable growth to 2037

Looking ahead, CIHT calls for infrastructure that is integrated, resilient, and future‑focused, supporting sustainable economic growth while addressing climate change and reducing inequalities. This includes investment in low‑carbon, multi‑modal transport, active travel, freight and logistics, and resilient networks that enable communities and businesses to thrive.