Paying for all those election promises could mean further opportunities for private finance in the funding of infrastructure.

It is over a year since the Link housing association unveiled a £45m deal that marked the first investment in the Scottish sector by a big City institution.

The funder M & G has meantime provided £25m for development of a 324-bed student residence for the University of St Andrews, and the Prudential's in-house fund manager says there is big untapped potential in the private financing of public assets. The only problem for hungry fund managers with debt to sell is the lack of available assets.

In the US, 80 per cent of long-term asset financing is provided by the capital markets, in the UK it is only 30 per cent.

M & G director Jo Waldron was banging the drum in Edinburgh recently for funds that give long-term investors access to "alternative credit", while offering potentially vital new avenues of financing for the public sector.

When the banks were closed in 2009, M & G launched a UK companies financing fund, and it was picked by the Treasury for a business finance partnership initiative, Around half of the group's fixed income managers are in private finance.

"Over the last seven years we have seen long-term financing of housing associations almost completely shift away from banks to institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies," Ms Waldron says. M & G has a three-strong team dedicated to the sector and has invested £5billion, of which almost a third was arranged directly with the associations rather than through public bond issues.

The fund manager wraps such investments into broader portfolios of "long-dated assets", which can be bought by the likes of local authority pension funds, as the industry dreams up innovative new vehicles as alternatives to the bombed-out market for government bonds.

In Wales the government has helped 17 housing associations to form a borrowing club, enabling the smaller ones to access very low amounts of cash.

"We would be very keen to do more with Scottish associations," Ms Waldron says. "The referendum probably proved quite a distraction for a number of people, and we continue to talk to a number of associations across Scotland."

Although infrastructure has been an investment buzzword for a while, more of the opportunities are in equity financing. "The difficulty is there really aren't that many assets," Ms Waldron says. "We have won the bid for Edinburgh Children's Hospital, we have the appetite and we would love to do more of it but there isn't a great deal going on."

At St Andrews the university will take a lease on the building and eventually gain ownership. "We are seeing more universities coming to the capital markets, even just with bond financing, it has been a growing sector," Ms Waldron says. "There is a lot of capital now chasing public assets, it is an interesting area we are going to see more and more of."