Go Dutch

As 10,000 cyclists weathered the late April wind and rain in London over the weekend, the calls to embrace a more ‘Dutch’ attitude to cyclists might just as well have been aimed at Chancellor George Osbourne and the few in charge of infrastructure spending in the UK.

Despite the collapse of its government a few weeks ago over the failure to approve new austerity measures, federal office PPPs have been hitting the market at an alarming rate.

Will elections in September see a new oversized government taking the stage, with plush offices and an army of civil servants?

Caretaker prime minister Mark Rutte will no doubt need to make concessions to opposition parties to get the measures approved in the coming weeks, but it is reassuring that PPP pipeline seems somewhat immune to the Euro debt crisis so far.

The same is true in Greece, where new waste management PPPs are being launched and approved every month. The scale of projects in both markets seems to chime well with local investors. 

In France, where a new government may be in place by next week, the mood among the infrastructure community is less certain.

Whether rumours of Hollande's natural distaste for PPP are true, or Sarkozy uses the cancellation of a project or programme to please the markets after a return to power, the large infrastructure schemes of last year already seem to be a distant memory.

If UK prime minister David Cameron is right and we are not even halfway through the euro crisis, a new French government will have little desire to get sizeable projects over the line with banks still in retreat.

Can pension funds and the Japanese banks hold up the market until the dark clouds disperse?

The Dutch and Greek have proven that a weak government doesn’t necessarily equate to a weak pipeline - in France, Spain and Portugal however infrastructure investment may be becoming more political than ever.