The National Infrastructure Commission is calling on the Government to set clear standards of resilience that infrastructure operators must maintain in the face of sudden shocks.

The call comes in a new report released by the NIC today – Developing Resilience Standards in UK Infrastructure.

The report argues that climate change and related weather extremes, alongside a heightened reliance on digital technologies, mean that the UK faces increased risks of vital networks and services being unavailable for extended periods,

Setting standards which operators have a duty to meet will enable the public to understand what level of service they can expect when incidents occur, says the Commission, while clear standards will enable infrastructure operators to plan and invest for the future.

The report considers three kinds of standard:

• Customer outcome standards: Service quality and reliability outcomes for customers – such as average length of service outages in a year.
• System performance standards: standards a system is required to meet – such as being able to deliver a service even after the failure of the biggest asset within a system.
• System recovery standards: Expected service recovery times after a service outage and the level of backup services which must be supplied to consumers in the event of an outage.

The report – which has been sent to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and other relevant Secretaries of State this week – sets out an analysis of current resilience standards across sectors including energy, digital, transport and water services.

Priorities identified include:

• A lack of consistency between the standards adopted by private telecoms networks serving critical national infrastructure, with a need for government to review whether the current approach is sufficient;
• A need for forward looking asset health standards in the energy, transport and water sectors, taking account of future risks including climate change related deterioration;
• Current lack of guidance on limits for the number of consumers dependant on a single asset for supplying their water, or the volume of water that water companies must be able to treat and supply in the course of a short peak demand period;
• The value of a key route strategy for the major road and rail network, indicating where one mode would not be able to handle likely additional usage caused by blockage on the other mode.

 Water sector-specific standards 

The NIC's recommendations for water sector-specific standards include:

• Peak demand: Government should consider a standard setting out the volume of water that water companies’ systems are required to be able to treat, store and put into supply over the course of a short peak demand period– as opposed to long term drought storage for which a standard already exists.
• Single source of supply: Government should consider a standard on the number of consumers reliant on a single asset for supplying their water.
• Forward looking asset health standard considering climate change related deterioration: The sector needs a forward looking asset health metric which assesses the likely remaining life of assets, and the probability of failure over time, to ensure that resilience is not threatened by a failure to invest in long term maintenance or to address future threats.
• One in 50 year storm risk reduction target: Ofwat has guidance for companies on reporting on the percentage of customers at risk from a one in 50 year storm event – an event with a two per cent annual probability. Government should consider setting a desired risk reduction target in line with the Commission’s recommendation for a single joint target for surface water flood risk reduction.

The report states:

"At present there does not appear to be a comprehensive and consistent understanding of asset condition across the sector and how this may change in future. A more complete view of asset health in the sector would support a multi-asset management period view of the investment required to maintain asset health and, consequently, service performance and reliability."

Resilience standards should be set in systematic way so they can be built into price control periods for regulated sectors

Building on recommendations made in the second National Infrastructure Strategy, published in October 2023, the Commission is calling on government to set resilience standards in a systematic way to ensure they can be built into forthcoming price control periods for regulated sectors.

The report notes this process will involve complex trade-offs between higher levels of resilience and the end cost for bill payers, noting that no service can deliver 100 per cent resilience at a cost likely to be acceptable to the public.

The report adds that undertaking such a process would also help operators in each sector understand the resilience of other sectors, to better manage interdependency risks between them. It repeats previous Commission calls for the Cabinet Office to play a co-ordinating role in managing such cross-sectoral risks.

However, the NIC acknowledges that in the water sector, the setting of resilience standards will be too late to influence the 2024 Price Review. The report says standard setting should be done over the next asset management period to target investment for Price Review 2029 and influence earlier system planning by water companies. The Commission proposes four stages to developing and implementing the resilience standards.

Government should publish an initial set of resilience standards by 2025

Professor Jim Hall, National Infrastructure Commissioner, said:

“With billions of pounds due to be spent over the next 20 years on new infrastructure to create a greener, more productive economy, the time is right for government to set out its expectations of operators in the face of growing resilience threats.

“Failing to do so will cost us all more in the long run, as expensive emergency measures have to be introduced to address service failures that could have been avoided by planned investment.

“None of us can expect every service to be 100 per cent reliable in the face of big shocks to the system, but we should at least know what we can reasonably expect from different utilities when extreme events occur. That allows us as individuals – as well as other impacted infrastructure sectors – to plan for different eventualities.”

The Commission is recommending that the Government should publish an initial set of resilience standards by 2025 so that around £400 billion of investment decisions due in the next five years can factor in these targets. This will enable operators to begin to build resilience towards the desired levels into their systems and to plan for future climate change. It will also enable system designers to take advantage of the uptick in investment in systems for other reasons – achieving net zero and supporting growth – to achieve these targets.

“It is much more efficient to build in resilience from the outset than to rely on costly retrofits,” the report says.

Click here to download the report in full