MILAN, March 23, 2021 – “For our Group, sustainability means, first and foremost, creating jobs, especially during a period of emergency like the one we are living in now. Italy needs a plan for the short term and a strategy for the long term. And the top priority is to give a sense of self-confidence back to the two million and a half people who do not have a job or risk losing it,” said Webuild Chief Executive Pietro Salini said during an interview on “Il mix delle cinque”, a programme hosted by Giovanni Minoli on Rai Radio 1, the Italian state radio broadcaster.

This priority, according to Salini, begins in southern Italy, “the part of the country that suffers the most. We have to keep in mind that we find ourselves in a storm that we have never seen before. So we have to act in a state of emergency. The country has discovered, for example, how much our health system is weak. In order to be resilient in the future, we have to invest today. We can’t wait for something terrible to happen tomorrow.”

We are in an emergency situation that investment in infrastructure can help overcome. “The country needs a big plan to invest in infrastructure that can relaunch competitiveness, sustainability and especially demand. We often find ourselves in situations of water scarcity in the south (of Italy), when our desalination plants give potable water across the Middle East. We have 40,000 schools that cannot be used. We travel every day along obsolete infrastructure that require a lot of investment to maintain but that is still not enough for it. We hear complaints about the inadequate state of our prisons, and we cannot use projects that remain incomplete because they have not been inspected. This is something that concerns public works, like the case of the bridge over the Strait of Messina: we have to take into account the cost of not doing something.”

But the country’s future plans to invest in infrastructure, said Salini, cannot base themselves only on the Recovery Plan. That plan should be considered as “part of a comprehensive plan that should be applied at the national level. We need to remember that the country has a budget that has to finance investments and the billions for infrastructure foreseen under the Recovery Plan are only part of what we would spend in six years. We must at all cost avoid having these resources used as a substitute. They should be treated as an addition to those already available under a big coordinated plan to be activated immediately. We are in an emergency and we need to do things quickly.”

It is an emergency that from a health point of view could be eradicated thanks to a national vaccination programme. “We have made ourselves immediately available to expand the vaccination programme at our company in Lombardy. Because every one of us must do his or her part to win this battle,” said Salini.