WET News

24 ALLIANCES 2019 The Infrastructure Alliance consists of two joint ventures working alongside Thames Water: Murphy and Morrison Utility Services (known as Agility) and Kier and Clancy Docwra (known as KCD). It was formed in April 2015 with the partners awarded five-year contracts and the additional prospect of extending those deals for a further 10 years into AMP7 and AMP8. Mott MacDonald has a supporting role to the Agility joint venture. The alliance, which is carrying out an estimated £1 billion worth of work in 2015-20, is responsible for delivering essential planned and reactive operational water network repair and maintenance, leak detection and mains replacement for Thames' 21,000-mile clean water network. Not only is it tasked with keeping nine million customers in supply but it is also delivering much of the necessary work for improvements to Thames' developer services offering, in response to regulatory changes in this area. The IA has initiated a number of projects that will transform Thames Water's day-to-day operations. These include a 'one desk' trial, which was started in the Thames Valley in October 2015 to combine the planning and customer assurance functions. The aim was to provide a single, coordinated service for customers, and the sustained success of this trial led to the initiative being deployed across the region. In the field of developer services, the alliance launched an online quoting tool for customers who want clean water connections. This is speeding up the process for developer customers. The IA's new methods of working have led to noticeable improvements in performance: Thames' streetworks costs, including fines, are predicted to fall by about £1 million per year, while positive feedback has been received from local authorities. The alliance has adopted a 'one team' ethos, backed up by the use of the Thames Water brand for its workwear and vehicle livery, and in the way it shares equally in incentives and penalties relating to outcome delivery. Leakage and interruptions to supply are key performance indicators; innovation and investment decisions are taken jointly and alliance members share the effect of any underspend or overspend against budget, as well as underperformance or outperformance against target. Thames Water's recently published business plan for 2020-25 should lay down a further challenge to the alliance, with stretching targets on leakage and interruptions to supply as well as a new emphasis on resilience. Thames was one of the water companies criticised for its response to the leaks and bursts arising from the 'Beast from the East' freeze-thaw event in March 2018. In response to the criticism, a new plan was produced for extreme weather events that will see a gold, silver and bronze command incident management structure for major incidents or forecasted significant threats. 'Gold command' will be led by a member of the Thames Water executive team with leads from each silver command. There will be improved modelling of weather events to allow early escalation and preparation of comprehensive plans ahead of any forecast adverse weather, and increased resources were promised to frontline teams including repair gangs, network engineers and customer agents to ensure a more flexible and responsive service. The development of real-time digital visualisation tools that take into account network information and customer contacts to provide a geospatial view of the impact of incidents are expected to allow teams to react in a faster, proactive, agile manner. Additional data from Thames' smart metering programme – which will see 300,000 customers fitted with smart meters by 2020 – is also expected to assist incident response in future. Infrastructure Alliance (IA) CLIENT: Thames Water PARTNERS: Morrison/Murphy, Kier/Clancy Docwra CONTRACT: Repair, maintain and upgrade below- ground water infrastructure TERM: Five years, with possible 10-year extension Infrastructure Alliance refreshes Thames pipe networks ALLIANCES 2019: THAMES WATER

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