How Westminster can stop red tape strangling its great reservoir-building programme

Taps running dry might become a common sight in UK households by 2055.

So warned the Environment Agency last year, noting it expects a daily public water supply shortfall of 5 billion litres within 30 years “without urgent action”.

That’s roughly a third of the nation’s current water use.

Since then, the government has published its 10-year infrastructure strategy (10YIS), which revealed plans to boost the nation's water storage capacity on an unprecedented scale.

Among other major projects, this hugely ambitious resource management programme specifies nine new large reservoirs.

The previous one – Carsington Water – was completed over 30 years ago, in 1992.

To deliver these reservoirs within an acceptable timescale, the infrastructure sector will need more support from the government, according to industry insiders.

How the UK infrastructure sector can keep taps flowing

At the first meeting of the ICE National Reservoir Infrastructure Forum, representatives from contractors, water companies, regulators, consultancies and environmental groups discussed obstacles to the planned increase in storage capacity.

The ICE held the event in partnership with Future Water, a joint venture of contractors Mackley and Jones Bros. The reservoir Future Water aims to finish before 2032 is Havant Thicket in Hampshire.

It will have a capacity of 8.7 billion litres, but the nine planned reservoirs in the 10YIS are considerably larger, with the smallest set to hold four times more water.

The forum, chaired by Future Water director Terry Fuller, identified four key areas in which the sector will need help to deliver such an ambitious programme:

• regulation and consenting processes;
• engineers’ roles and responsibilities;
• supply chain capacity; and
• geotechnical investigations.

Regulation and consenting processes

The forum’s consensus was that a clearer consenting pathway for the new reservoirs would be a welcome development.

This would help to streamline delivery by reducing the bureaucracy involved in obtaining all the regulatory approvals needed.

Reservoir project owners must often duplicate work in trying to meet the legal requirements of the various planning authorities involved.

One attendee cited the example of the Environment Agency’s stipulation to include a dam breach analysis in the environmental impact assessment required for securing a development consent order.

This analysis will cover the likely ecological effects of such a failure, yet there’s also a requirement under the Reservoirs Act 1975 to publish a major accidents and disasters assessment. That document must also predict the probable impacts of a dam breach.

Noting that the nuclear energy sector has benefited from streamlined planning assessments for new power stations, participants suggested that the government should treat reservoirs similarly, given their importance.

Engineers’ roles and responsibilities

The forum noted that the Reservoirs Act 1975 should be updated to account for advances in the industry’s practices over the past five decades.

The act requires one named construction engineer to be responsible for signing off a reservoir’s design and construction. That individual must accept personal legal liability for structural safety.

The chosen engineer must be a member of the all reservoirs panel, a body created on the recommendation of the 1986 Coxon report into the failure of the dam being built to create Carsington Water.

A panel engineer also has to oversee structural inspections.

Since several organisations will be involved in the design and construction of a reservoir, the panel engineer must deal with, and check the work of, many people. This places a lot of demand on one person.

Such arrangements may not be realistic for the new generation of reservoirs, given that there are only 26 engineers on the panel.

This small band of experts may be stretched to the limit when several assets are being built at the same time around the country.

Supply chain capacity

Participants expressed concern about the sector’s capacity to build several large reservoirs over a relatively short period.

They highlighted the risk that a lack of skills, materials and equipment would cause costly bottlenecks.

Calculating the programme’s total resource demands, then comparing these with the supply chain’s current capacity, could help to identify the most serious potential shortages.

Nonetheless, suppliers will be reluctant to invest heavily in boosting their resources until they’re more confident that the programme will proceed.

To see a project included in the government’s Infrastructure Pipeline is no guarantee that it will go ahead as planned, noted Mike Jones, head of new business at Jones Bros.

“Part of the problem is that we have this pipeline plotted out but it doesn’t feel real until it’s got planning consent and funding,” he said. “Put it this way: I’m not going to order 200 dumper trucks tomorrow on the strength of it.”

In the onshore wind sector, by contrast, “I know where the next 10 [installations] are coming from. I know they have dates for their grid connections, so I can plan.”

Geotechnical investigations

The forum agreed that the sector would benefit from some official instruction concerning the type and extent of geotechnical investigation required by large reservoir projects.

No matter how thorough these surveys are, there will always be some risk of running into unexpected problems after excavations start in earnest.

Mark Malcolm, programme director at Anglian Water, said that he would like to see best-practice guidance on these activities, which can go as far as building trial embankments.

“We’ve all done things slightly differently so far,” he said. “It would be helpful to have a standard or guideline that allows developers to get the right level of funding to access sites early and try to de-risk projects.”

One complication is that landowners can be reluctant to give access to the site to conduct geotechnical investigations, especially if these are extensive.

A knowledge-sharing coalition

Despite these challenges, Fuller believes that the reservoir programme will be key to solving England’s forecasted shortfalls.

To achieve that, sharing lessons learnt and best practice will be crucial.

“At Havant Thicket, we’re delivering the first new reservoir for 40 years and there are several client-led groups considering other proposed reservoirs,” Fuller said.

“Our forum aims to bring learnings together and distil them into evidence-based recommendations.

“The discussions today have also highlighted some key actions… that would really help the industry to deliver these major infrastructure projects.”