Last week, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), the regulator for Britain’s railways and England’s strategic road network, published a report into climate change adaptation. As the report observes, the majority of the UK’s highway network was designed and built before the effects of climate change were understood.
The impacts of our changing weather patterns are only too apparent. Last week saw Storm Bert wreak havoc in England and Wales causing flooding and damage to roads and properties as well as power outages, damage to other infrastructure and landslides.
The problem for infrastructure owners, highlighted in the National Infrastructure Commission’s (NIC’s) September 2024 report, Developing resilience standards in UK infrastructure, is that we only think about resilience when things go horribly wrong. The NIC is calling on the Government to create a series of resilience standards, which set out what should be expected from our infrastructure, and which will guide investment and funding decisions.
Considering flood risk, the ORR report shines a light on the difficulties National Highways faces in ensuring the resilience of its drainage assets. It says that the drainage resilience performance of our strategic road network (SRN) has declined; as of March 2024, 36% of the SRN had an observed susceptibility to flooding, up from 31% the previous year. National Highways has less data about its drainage assets than it does about other elements of the network, says ORR, a situation it is working hard to rectify.
The same issues – and more - face those running our local road networks. In fact, the challenges here are even greater. Data about the condition of roads, drainage and other assets is patchy and inconsistent between different authorities, according to the NIC. And local authorities have been battling insufficient budgets to even maintain service as usual on their highways, at a time when they need to be investing for future resilience with longer-term funding to allow them to plan properly.
The NIC report proposes three types of resilience standards:
· Customer outcome standards, such as average length of service outages that should be experienced in a year.
· System performance standards, such as being able to deliver a service even after the failure of the biggest asset within a system.
· System recovery standards which set expected recovery times after a service outage and the level of backup services to be supplied to consumers if there is an outage.
The NIC says that these standards need to be set at a national level, since different infrastructure networks are interdependent. For example, if there is a major issue with a rail service, it is important that the highways networks can take the strain. It also says that it will be more cost effective to build resilience standards into other infrastructure investment, particularly as we are constructing new assets for the transition to net zero.
For local roads, the NIC calls on Government to develop a consistent metric for measuring their condition, reporting that 20% of local authorities did not share data about the proportion of their A roads that should be considered for maintenance in 2023. With the relevant information in hand, and targets for resilience set, better decisions about funding allocation could then be made.
There is certainly a lot for new transport secretary Heidi Alexander to think about. But without a more strategic approach to future proofing our vital national and road networks – and connected infrastructure - against the impacts of climate change, events like Storm Bert will continue to cause more damage, deterioration and cost in years to come.
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