Clearer standards needed to boost economy’s resilience says NIC

by Adrian Tatum

Government should set clear standards of resilience that infrastructure operators must maintain in the face of sudden shocks, the National Infrastructure Commission has reiterated in a new report.

Climate change and related weather extremes, alongside a heightened reliance on digital technologies, mean that the UK faces increased risks of vital networks and services being unavailable for extended periods, argues the report.

Setting standards which operators have a duty to meet will enable the public to understand what level of service they can expect when incidents occur, says the Commission, while clear standards will enable infrastructure operators to plan and invest for the future.

The report – which has been sent to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and other relevant Secretaries of State this week – sets out an analysis of current resilience standards across sectors including energy, digital, transport and water services. Priorities identified include:

A lack of consistency between the standards adopted by private telecoms networks serving critical national infrastructure, with a need for government to review whether the current approach is sufficient;
A need for forward looking asset health standards in the energy, transport and water sectors, taking account of future risks including climate change related deterioration;
Current lack of guidance on limits for the number of consumers dependant on a single asset for supplying their water, or the volume of water that water companies must be able to treat and supply in the course of a short peak demand period;
The value of a key route strategy for the major road and rail network, indicating where one mode would not be able to handle likely additional usage caused by blockage on the other mode.

Building on recommendations made in the second National Infrastructure Strategy, published in October 2023, the Commission calls on government to set resilience standards in a systematic way to ensure they can be built into forthcoming price control periods for regulated sectors.

The report notes this process will involve complex trade-offs between higher levels of resilience and the end cost for bill payers, noting that no service can deliver 100 per cent resilience at a cost likely to be acceptable to the public.

The report adds that undertaking such a process would also help operators in each sector understand the resilience of other sectors, to better manage interdependency risks between them. It repeats previous Commission calls for the Cabinet Office to play a co-ordinating role in managing such cross-sectoral risks.

Professor Jim Hall, National Infrastructure Commissioner, said:

“With billions of pounds due to be spent over the next 20 years on new infrastructure to create a greener, more productive economy, the time is right for government to set out its expectations of operators in the face of growing resilience threats.

“Failing to do so will cost us all more in the long run, as expensive emergency measures have to be introduced to address service failures that could have been avoided by planned investment.

“None of us can expect every service to be 100 per cent reliable in the face of big shocks to the system, but we should at least know what we can reasonably expect from different utilities when extreme events occur. That allows us as individuals – as well as other impacted infrastructure sectors – to plan for different eventualities.”