The past is not always the best guide to the future and proactive steps are needed to ensure the UK’s infrastructure can remain resilient, according to a new report by the National Infrastructure Commission.

The Commission has set out a new framework to help support change across infrastructure sectors and is calling for transparent standards of appropriate service levels, stress testing for major incidents and clearer direction for utilities providers to invest in long term resilience. Together, the report finds, these steps will ensure the country’s infrastructure can better resist, absorb and recover from shocks.

Among the recommendations in the study, the Commission is calling on the Government to introduce a statutory requirement by 2022 for Secretaries of State to publish:

• clear, proportionate and realistic standards every five years for the resilience of energy, water, digital, road and rail services
• an assessment of how existing structures, powers and incentives enable operators to deliver these standards or where changes are needed.
• The NIC also says that regulators should introduce obligations on infrastructure operators to meet these resilience standards by 2023.

The NIC also wants regulators to require a system of regular stress testing by 2024 for energy, water, digital, road and rail infrastructure operators, to ensure that infrastructure operators’ systems and decision-making can credibly meet government’s resilience standards for infrastructure services. It is also proposing that regulators should introduce obligations by 2023 on infrastructure operators to require them to participate in stress tests and to require remedial action in case of failure of stress tests.

The evidence base used in the study was undertaken before the current Covid-19 pandemic, and the report notes that it is too early to fully assess and learn lessons from the ongoing crisis.

Anticipate, React, Recover: Resilient Infrastructure Systems instead focuses on previous disruptions and failures and the response of the UK’s energy, water, digital, road and rail infrastructure over a longer timeframe – drawing on examples including the widescale power outage of August 2019 and the various incidents of flooding experienced in the UK over recent years.

It also highlights the impact on New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005: a failure to adapt infrastructure to respond to a changing climate and population growth led to a catastrophic impact on the city and its people.

The Commission warns that the UK’s generally robust historic resilience may be challenged in future by a range of factors that will not always be possible to foresee, alongside better understood challenges like climate change.

Introducing the report, Sir John Armitt, Chair of the Commission, said:

Events over the past year, including major floods and the UK’s worst loss of power to the grid for a decade, have offered a glimpse of the damaging disruption that is possible when something goes wrong. While the flooding was localised and the power cut short term, both caused chaos for families and businesses

To prepare better, the NIC is calling for the government should set clear resilience standards for infrastructure operators, and introduce stress tests overseen by regulators similar to those employed in the financial sector. Operators should also be required to develop and maintain long term resilience strategies, and regulators should ensure their determinations support achieving the prescribed resilience standards, according to the Commission.

The report includes a new framework to improve resilience, offering an approach for government, regulators and operators to use collaboratively when developing plans for anticipating and handling short term shocks. The framework sets out six key aspects of resilience: anticipate, resist, absorb, recover, adapt and transform, which the Commission will also use in its own future analysis of resilience strategies.

Acknowledging the recent pressures placed on infrastructure operators, Sir John Armitt commented:

“The Commission pays tribute to all those who are helping to minimise the impact to infrastructure during this period, often at significant personal risk.

“While this report draws on evidence collected before the pandemic, this study can inform thinking about the recovery and help ensure that we can be resilient to future challenges.

“To safeguard the systems our communities rely on, everyone involved in running infrastructure needs to anticipate and prepare for potential future challenges. The framework proposed in our report offers the tools to face uncomfortable truths, value resilience properly, test for vulnerabilities and drive adaptation before it is too late.”

Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency, said:

“The climate emergency means shocks to the economy from record weather events are following each other with increasing speed.

“Creating more resilient infrastructure, and building back better after a climate-induced shock, doesn’t just reduce risks, it’s an economic opportunity too. This report will help people better understand that opportunity.”

Click here to download Anticipate, React, Recover: Resilient Infrastructure Systems