LONDON – Australian businesses have committed to investing 28.5 billion pounds ($37.5 billion) in sectors such as infrastructure and clean energy in Britain, the British government said following a UK-Australia investment roundtable.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and International Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan met with 10 Australian chief executives and senior executives on Wednesday evening to discuss the investments and opportunities for further collaboration.
The investments include a pledge by financial services firm Macquarie Group to support 12 billion pounds of investment by 2030 in infrastructure projects including offshore wind, gigabit broadband and hydrogen hubs, the government said.
It said this would include Macquarie’s Green Investment Group founding a new UK-headquartered global offshore wind development business Corio, and developing two new British offshore wind sites over the next decade.
Other investments include 5.5 billion pounds from real estate and investment group Lendlease and its partners over the next five years to deliver new low carbon homes as part of major regeneration projects in London and Birmingham.
IFM Investors plan to deliver 3 billion in investment over five years to maintain existing assets such as Stansted and East Midlands airports, and create a new net zero fund to support large-scale infrastructure energy transition projects.
The government also said pension fund AustralianSuper forecasted a further 8 billion pounds in investments across the UK over the next five years.
Last month AustralianSuper’s head of international investments told the Financial Times newspaper the fund expected to more than double its UK assets from 7 billion to more than 15 billion by 2026.
Britain and Australia signed a free trade deal in December projected to eventually boost bilateral trade by over 10 billion pounds.
Total goods and services trade between Britain and Australia was worth 14.5 billion pounds in the year to June 2021, with Australia ranked Britain’s 21st-largest trade partner and accounting for 1.2% of total British trade.
($1 = 0.7601 pounds)
(Reporting by Kylie MacLellan; editing by Michael Holden)
