WET News

News: Stonbury awarded framework with South East Water. P3 Onsite: Digital engineering for the totex environment. P18 Insight: Eco-friendly phosphorus removal with Soneco. P20 WET NEWS WATER AND EFFLUENT TREATMENT NEWS Lane rental scheme gets green light for nationwide roll-out APRIL 2018 Volume 24 • Issue 4 NI Water eyes Nereda solution Acala acquires Portsmouth Water T h e g o v e r n m e n t h a s announced the roll-out of a scheme under which utili- ties will have to pay up to £2,500 per day to carry out streetworks on busy roads. Lane rental schemes have been piloted in greater London and Kent, and the Department for Transport said it will now extend t h e a p p r o a c h a c r o s s t h e country. Local authorities will need to apply to the transport secretary for permission to set up lane rental schemes, and once granted will be able to charge up to £2,500 per day for 'renting' a lane during peak hours. The government will issue guidance later this year on how the schemes will operate, with a view to having the - rst ones up and running by the end of 2019. The idea is to incentivise com- panies to minimise the disruption of streetworks by encouraging oƒ -peak and night-time work, or even to collaborate to avoid roads being dug up multiple times. Local authorities will also be restricted on how they can use surpluses generated from lane rental schemes on measures to reduce streetworks disruption. Transport minister Jo Johnson said: "Drivers o‡ en see red when roadworks cause them delays, especially if no one is working on them. Lane rental has seen a massive drop in disruption to drivers as utility companies have changed when and where they carry out work." RAC head of roads policy Nicholas Lyes added: " Trials showed that some of the worst congestion caused by planned utility works in London was reduced by half on roads where lane rental was in operation, so rolling this out will extend the bene- ts nationwide." However, Bob Gallienne, chief executive of Street Works UK, told WET News the report on the trials "could actually find no causal link between reductions in con- gestion and lane rental" and that the level of congestion caused by streetworks carried out on behalf N orthern Ireland Water has begun operating a Nereda pilot plant in Belfast as it seeks a solution to a capacity crisis at the main wastewater treatment works in the capital. Paddy Brow, head of the com- pany's 'Living with Water' pro- gramme, told the WWT Water Northern Ireland Conference that a £250,000 contract has been signed for a plant to use the bio- logical wastewater treatment process over a six-month period. With no space for expansion at the current works, it is hoped Nereda can double biological capacity and achieve the more stringent standards expected in the future as well as proving the best whole-life cost solution. The need for a solution at the B e l f a s t Ww T W i s b e co m i ng urgent, with the original design capacity 290,000 PE and current use estimated to be 500,000 PE. NI Water's analysis also shows that 20-30 per cent of the sewage catchment load in nearby areas does not reach the WwTW due to network issues, and Brow said: "If we were to fix the network, we would immediately push the treatment works into non-com- pliance. We're now in a situation where you can't invest in the sew- age networks because that would cause the treatment works to fail." P ortsmouth Water has been acquired by infrastructure investment manager Ancala Partners for an undisclosed sum. Ancala said it has agreed to buy South Downs Capital, the parent company of the water-only - rm, and that the investment will allow Portsmouth Water to pursue growth opportunities. It suggested this could include investments to "utilise the com- pany's privileged water resource position for the bene- t of both Portsmouth Water customers and neighbouring areas through the provision of bulk supplies". Portsmouth Water's chairman, Mike Kirk, described the deal as a "positive development" that " p r e s e r v e s t h e c o m p a n y ' s independence". David Owens, industry partner at Ancala Partners and a former chief executive at Thames Water, will join the board of Portsmouth Water as a non-executive director following completion of the transaction. He said: "Portsmouth Water has a committed and highly skilled workforce and manage- ment team. We look forward to working with them to build on Portsmouth Water's leading posi- tion in the sector and further improve their proposition to customers." "All the powers in a permit scheme allow authorities to specify when and where works should take place," he said. "They can do that within the existing legislation and within the existing statutory structure and they don't need lane rental to carry that out." He warned that utilities – and by extension contractors – now face a range of issues, not least because lane rental does nothing t o i r o n o u t v a r i a t i o n s i n permits. "With lane rental, there's addi- tional cost incurred as the result of the fees and the cost of working out-of-hours to avoid the fees," he said. "There's also a very wide range of differing schemes – a utility could cover an area of 20 or 30 diƒ erent highway authori- ties, and all of those highway authorities can be operating a slightly diƒ erent permit scheme with slightly diƒ erent interpreta- tions. If you lay lane rental on top of that, you're into another layer which makes it much more costly and much more complex to actu- ally manage street works." See analysis, p8. "At the level we work at, I would suggest we are one of the leaders in that ‰ eld" Neal Whittle, Eric Wright Water, P12 "Reasoned opinion from the contractor is seen as whinging" Murray Ambler-Shattock , K M Plant Hire, on lane rental. P8 Water, P12 of utility companies is "very low". He said: "When you look at some of the Inrix numbers and the Transport for London num- bers, about 8 per cent of conges- tion is caused by roadworks and streetworks. Around 50 per cent of that is utilities only – so you're talking maybe 4 per cent or 5 per cent caused by streetworks." Gallienne said existing permit schemes, used by only two-thirds of local authorities, were su£ cient to manage congestion eƒ ectively if properly implemented. ¤ Authorities may charge up to £2,500 per lane per day for streetworks "[Lane rental] makes it much more costly and much more complex to actually manage streetworks" Bob Gallienne, Street Works UK t. 0800 8046 062 www.atiuk.com Continuous water quality monitors for distribution networks Network Monitoring_90x265_Wet News.indd 1 13/03/2017 20:15

• Cover