He also criticised the IPA, which reports to the Cabinet Office and Treasury and which is meant to support delivery of all types of major projects ranging from railways and roads to defence, schools and hospitals.
Mr Jones said that the IPA had evolved into a compliance body rather than leading the way.
He said: “The Infrastructure and Projects Authority has expanded a lot over the years since it was first created. If we’re honest, it’s become a bit of a compliance function, and needs to be more about speeding up delivery and focusing on delivery.”
He said the result of having infrastructure split between two bodies meant the sector lacked leadership and authority – which the new organisation, NISTA, would be expected to provide.
He said: “We have infrastructure that’s not delivering for parts of the country, that’s holding back our growth and our potential.
“We think we can really create an authority at the centre of government that has the buy-in of Treasury, the Cabinet Office, and No 10, working with departments and other partners to really drive delivery in the way that we want to and to actually fix the problems that all of us know.”
British families worse off than Americans
Analyses by Britain Remade, which campaigns for better infrastructure management, show the impact of the UK’s failures on energy, transport links and construction of new homes. It calculates that British families are now £13,500 worse off than the average American family and almost £6,000 worse off than the average German family.
It reviewed over 300 transport projects across 20 countries and found Britain builds trams at twice the cost of the European average and almost four times the cost in Germany. Britain pays three times more than Germany to electrify its rail lines and HS2 worked out nine times more expensive than the Tours to Bordeaux high speed line.
Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at Britain Remade, said: “On almost every form of infrastructure from rail to road, from nuclear power stations to trams, Britain spends more on a like-for-like basis.
“Too often Britain reinvents the wheel and lessons learnt on one project are forgotten for the next. Some projects are chopped-and-changed so many times over that their cost balloons and hundreds of millions of pounds are wasted on unnecessary work.
“The TransPennine Rail Upgrade which morphed from a straightforward electrification project to a massive change forecast to cost £10bn highlights the need for reform in the way the UK plans and executes infrastructure projects.”
Sir John Armitt, chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, who is 78 years old and steps down in January, welcomed Labour’s plan for a 10-year infrastructure delivery strategy.
He said : “Closing the infrastructure gap between what the UK has and what we need is a long, hard task. NISTA provides an opportunity to bring delivery of this strategy into the heart of government.”