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UTILITY WEEK | 5TH - 11TH MAY 2017 | 13 Utility Week Live 2017 A new solution Nestled amidst the Medway towns of Kent, the UK's first garden city in over a generation is taking shape in a set of disused quarries. The new settlement at Ebbsfleet, which is centred on the Eurostar station of the same name, will boast 15,000 new homes if current plans come to fruition. When installing essential services for new developments, utilities oen start on the back foot because neighbours are disgruntled. The main headache for utilities though is the chicken and egg nature of conducting installations on new developments. It's not in the developers' interest to pay for services to be installed services until they have made some money by sell- ing homes. Equally, utilities are prevented from carrying out speculative installation work. The upshot is that too oen new home owners see their pristine verges and roadways having to be dug up. And the time for carrying out the work will be telescope, leading to logistical headaches. At Ebbsfleet, the showpiece project in the government's programme of new city developments, utility companies and planners have come up with a way to get around this headache. The Treasury's Infrastructure and Projects Authority has provided upfront funding to install a network of so-called utilities corridors along key routes like arterial roads and railway lines, which will form the backbone of the services for the new town. The corridors will oen be installed along verges and footpaths. Developers don't have to pay immedi- ately for the work, which can be clawed back over a period of time. Laying down the core utilities infra- structure upfront should cost-effective and environmentally beneficial, says a spokesperson for NJUG, which helped get Ebbsfleet off the ground. And if the Ebbsfleet projects turns out to be successful, the hope is that the model can be used in up to 70 new settle- ments that are currently in the develop- ment pipeline around England. The FT Replacement Stop Tap Locking Lid – Customer Saves £222,500 in just 9 months! Yorkshire Water (YW) has been using the FT replacement stop tap locking lids for over 15 years. The average cost to YW for a complete reinstatement of a stop tap box is £330. Whenever possible they will simply replace the lid which, including the cost of a street furniture operative visit, averages £80 per lid. This means that YW saves £250 every time they replace a locking lid! Between April and December 2016, YW used 890 lids. In just 9 months the company has saved £222,500 by not having to completely reinstate stop tap boxes. Yorkshire Water comment: The YW Capital scheme for street furniture is allocated each year and always under severe pressure so we rely upon innovative solutions to save both time and money. The locking lid concept allows us to send one resource to site; the repair is completed on first inspection rather than relying on another team to be deployed to complete the works. There are obvious cost savings on resource, planning, materials, traffic management etc. but also oen these covers are reported missing by Highways so we have a duty to respond (under S81 NRSWA) within 2 hours, so it's far better for us to send a man in a van to complete a repair than diverting a gang from planned works. Also obviously we minimise risk to pedestrians and road users with a timely repair. FT Pipeline Systems will be on Stand H10 at Utility Week Live EXHIBITOR VIEW About the exhibition Streetworks are top of the agenda at this year's Utility Week Live at Birmingham's NEC from 23-24 May, with the return of the Streetworks Village and the launch of a new, dedicated Streetworks Conference, in partnership with NJUG and sponsored by Elgin. Speakers at the conference include Stephen Dance, head of infrastructure delivery at HM Treasury, and David Latham, co-chair of HAUC England. For more information and to book your tickets, go to www.utilityweeklive.co.uk Exhibitors at the Streetworks Zone include: Resapol; NJUG; Colas; Virgin Media; C.Scope; Metal Box; Line Search Before you dig; Landmark Information Group; Aggregate Industries; MBW; Tricel Limited; JSP; Synthotech; PF Cusack; Capture Green; Elgin; Pipe Hawk Plc; SRL Traffic Management; Streetworks Soware Management; Vivax Metrotech; Kobus; Marwood Group; Filo Form; Cubis Industries. In association with: