Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | JUNE 2023 | 33 Water Setting the right standards for resilience There is a need for common resilience standards across the various infrastructure sectors. Comment R esilience in the UK water sector is demonstrably strong when you consider the likelihood that a customer has their water or wastewater service unexpectedly interrupted or reduced. This is enabled by ongoing investment activity and a wide range of require- ments and standards that are in place. For example, in water resources planning there are de• ned levels for expected average needs for the use of Temporary Use Bans (o• en referred to as hosepipe bans) in a drought. Furthermore, much of the sector's core regulatory meas- ures link to levels of service resilience for customers. But there are crucial gaps in national standards. In their • rst baseline review of the UK's economic infrastructure, the National Infrastructure Commis- sion (NIC) recommended to government that resilience standards should be established across the regulated sectors – something that was expected in the govern- ment's National Resilience Framework (Nov22) and has been pledged. To maintain and advance water service resilience in the face of growing challenges, including climate change, the water sector, its stakeholders and policy- makers, should look to de• ne a holistic and integrated set of resilience standards that would capture minimum best practice to inform e† ective long-term planning. With increasing complexity, it is vital to improve consid- eration for dependencies across sectors. For example, the satisfactory resilience of a water treatment works relies on electricity, chemicals and both physical and digital communications. This could build on the work set out in the 2010 Cabinet O‹ ce publication Keeping the Country Running. It is therefore important that any resilience standards are consistent, complementary, and cognisant of other requirements across the UK's infrastructure providers and associated interdependent services. It is also important to ensure robust testing and exer- cising of resilience plans and standards to prove they work beyond the theoretical desktop exercise that this can easily become if not fully considered. Again, this aligns to another of the NICs recommendation to govern- ment from its • rst baseline review into the resilience of the UKs economic infrastructure. The mechanism for introducing resilience standards needs in-depth consideration to ensure an e† ective and e‹ cient approach. Many of the existing standards are set in legislation and regulation, linked with formal review processes. Therefore, government departments, Ofwat, the EA and DWI would all have an important role here, along with companies and the supply chain. To successfully improve resilience with regards to inter- dependencies across sectors will be complex by its very nature, and therefore will require collaboration, consid- eration and coordination. While not all aspects of resilience relate to hard engineering, and an e† ective organisation is always striving for e‹ ciencies and innovations, ultimate levels of resilience in an infrastructure system are limited by engineering and technical feasibilities and there- fore resilience must be balanced with the cost, social a† ordability, and willingness of society to pay for that resilience. Gordon Rogers, head of long-term strategy, United Utilities, Reform for resilience This column is taken from Utility Week's report Reform for Resilience, published in association with PA consulting. The content of the report was shaped by members of the Utility Week Taskforce, senior leaders from across the energy and water industries convened by Utility Week to guide our reporting and campaigning on critical industry challenges. Key recommendations included in the report, which can be downloaded free from Utility Week's website, include: • Consideration of resilience-driven investment needs to be given equal pri- ority alongside focus on new legislative and regulatory requirements around net zero and curbing pollution. • There is an urgent need to give more priority to boosting and safeguarding resilience in energy and water, which could be helped by setting up an authoritative cross-sector new forum to examine the need for action and invest- ment and acceptable levels of resilience. It could be along the lines of RAPID – the Regulators' Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development. • Greater resilience investment must be coupled with the idea of behaviour change to encourage people to conserve energy and water – and also prevent the blockage of drains and sewers. • Di† erent investment vehicles should be introduced outside the price reviews – more like the model for Tideway, but adapted for smaller projects. • Water resilience standards should be introduced, which would set out prescriptive measures of operational reliability. Report produced in association with

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