The CBI seems to have been very active lately and has published a report on what needs to be done to attract investment in infrastructure. (http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1507874/cbi_-_an_offer_they_shouldn_t_refuse_-_attracting_investment_to_uk_infrastructure.pdf).
For me, this is all very sensible, and much of it has already been recognised in the waste sector judging by some of the noises coming out of UK Green Investments, the precursor to the Green Investment Bank.
The CBI recommends a split finance model which might take the form of some sort of post-construction refinancing guarantees that would enable banks to finance the construction phase and institutional investors to then come in on the (lower risk) operational phase. Personally I think this sort of approach seems quite sensible but some infrastructure operators who corporately finance their projects might consider this an unfair intervention in financial markets if done using government backing.
The other issue for waste infrastructure assets is that, in the greater scheme of things, they aren't very big. For institutional investors they just don't have the scale to be attractive and would therefore have to be packaged up and aggregated in some way.
The other big issue for me in the report is 'credit enhancing', i.e. some form of government first-loss guarantee/debt. But the government (in the form of the GIB) doesn't want to be idiot in the room taking more of the risk without a commensurate reward.
Overall, there are big macroeconomic problems coming from the capital adequacy regulations being placed on the banking sector. These are forcing it to retrench and are a significant cause of ongoing depressed economic conditions. In this context, I can't see a simple solution which the government could take without putting public funds at risk and losing the advantages of privately financing new infrastructure projects.
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