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It measures support for parties and much else besides, from attitudes to tax and immigration to what consumers expect of the companies they buy from. Government, business, the press and our own profession all run on it.

Done properly, polling gives the public an accurate account of what their fellow citizens think and gives decision-makers evidence not selected to flatter them. It has earned its standing over decades by showing its working, and the first thing it shows is who asked.

The British Polling Council (BPC) requires any published findings from a social or political poll to name the client who commissioned it. The rule is short and uncomplicated. It exists because a reader can only weigh a poll properly if they know the interests behind it.

Recent days have shown what happens when they cannot. Three polls commissioned on behalf of Reform UK and conducted by JL Partners appeared in the Times and the Telegraph with no mention of the party. The BPC has said its rule was clearly breached, and it and the Market Research Society have opened inquiries. Whether the money behind the polls should have been declared elsewhere is a question for others.

None of this means research must be presented blandly. Polling is routinely commissioned to generate coverage, and that is legitimate. Nobody has suggested the polling in question was inaccurate, and a commissioning organisation is entitled to lead with its strongest finding and frame it for the audience it wants to reach. Selective emphasis is the ordinary craft of communications. Concealment is where it goes wrong.

Yet good practice is not onerous. Name yourself as the client when the findings are published, put the fieldwork dates, sample size and method alongside the story, and agree all of it before fieldwork begins. Where someone else is paying, name them too.

This happened in a country that has already run out of trust to spend. The British Social Attitudes survey finds 12 per cent of people trust governments to put the country before their party, the lowest figure it has recorded. The Ipsos Veracity Index has trust in politicians at its lowest in four decades. A generation of scandals has taught us that the public will not be told where money meets influence.

Polling has kept its authority through all of that because it is one of the few forms of information people treat as a measure rather than a message. A poll on a front page is read as the country’s own voice, which is exactly why a party would want its research in print without its name on it.

The damage goes further than one poll or one party. A reader misled by a hidden client is in the dark about more than the provenance of that poll. The instrument they use to weigh every other political claim has been tampered with. Once people learn that a front-page figure may have been paid for by the party it flatters, they discount the honest ones alongside it. The pollsters who follow the rules pay the price for the ones who do not, and the public loses the one honest reading it had of its own opinion. A country that cannot trust its polls cannot know what it thinks, and a country that does not know what it thinks can be told anything.

This is how trust erodes. Rarely through a single large lie, more often through a death by a thousand small cuts, each teaching the public that what they are shown may not be what it claims to be.

Alastair McCapra is CEO of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations

Sellafield Ltd is celebrating 10 years of its pioneering Game Changers programme. It brings new ideas and technology to the UK’s toughest nuclear clean-up challenges.

Game Changers connects Sellafield with innovators from industry, academia, and beyond. It gives new technologies a route into the nuclear sector. Doing so, helps turn promising ideas into practical solutions.

The programme has helped speed up problem-solving. Welcoming fresh thinking from outside the sector has helped improve safety. It has also reduced hazards and saved money.

Game Changers is designed and delivered by innovation specialists FIS360. They work in partnership with the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory (UKNNL). FIS360 supports both challenge owners and solution providers from start to finish. It helps them develop and test new technologies. These have the potential for deployment across the industry.

The programme is now one of the UK’s top innovation initiatives. It has supported hundreds of projects. These are changing how nuclear sites are cleaned up safely and efficiently.

Game Changers has:

• received more than 1,000 applications from organisations around the world
• funded more than 300 feasibility studies
• enabled over 125 proof-of-concept projects
• supported small and medium-sized enterprises

This helps to strengthen the UK’s supply chain and support economic growth.

Several projects show how the programme turns ideas into solutions with real-world impact:

Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

Developed with Ice9 Robotics. The Micro UAV is a small drone that can fly through openings as narrow as 140mm. It captures live images and data from confined and hazardous areas.

The drone gives access to parts of nuclear facilities that were difficult to inspect. It keeps people out of hazardous areas and supports better decommissioning decisions.

It could also save up to £2 million per use case avoiding the need to create new access points.

Seracam

Serac Imaging Systems developed Seracam in partnership with Loughborough University.

The imaging system overlays radiation data onto live video. This allows operators to identify and monitor contamination hotspots in real time.

Sellafield has purchased a Seracam unit. It has been trialled successfully in the MOX Demonstration Facility. Early results show strong potential to improve safety, reduce risk, and speed up work.

Smart Cans

This is a radiation-tolerant sensor system developed by Sensor Driven. It monitors the temperature and pressure of nuclear storage cans. It alerts operators to changes in real time.

The sensors have been miniaturised, tested in harsh environments, and fitted to storage cans using a new welding process.

The technology could improve the safety of long-term Special Nuclear Material storage. It will do this while reducing the need for manual inspections and maintenance. Potential cost savings are between £20 million and £50 million.

The future

The next decade of Game Changers will focus on:

• scaling up successful technologies
• speeding up deployment
• attracting more world-class innovators to the sector

Robin Ibbotson, Sellafield Ltd’s chief technology officer, said:

“I’m proud of the innovation we see across Sellafield and the people who solve problems every day. Year after year, we show what happens when we challenge accepted thinking.

Game Changers takes our challenges beyond the nuclear industry. It connects us with organisations of all sizes and with partners from around the world. Over the last decade, that approach has produced solutions we would never have found on our own.

The programme is helping us deliver safer, faster, and more cost-effective operations. And we’re only at the beginning. Sellafield still has decades of important work ahead.

With the right partners, we can solve any challenge. That’s why we’ll keep sharing our problems, finding new ideas, and working together to deliver our mission faster.”

Credit: Adobe Stock

Many of the hot weather problems experienced by our physical infrastructure stem from the behaviour of most materials, which tend to expand and soften as the temperature increases. This affects roads, railways and bridges directly in several ways.

Most of the UK’s roads are surfaced with asphalt, a composite material comprising aggregates with about five per cent by weight of bitumen binder. The structural performance, serviceability and rate of deterioration of an asphalt road are all directly affected by temperature. During heatwaves, asphalt road surfaces can reach temperatures in excess of 60C. This causes the bitumen binder to soften, leading to deformation, surface depression and bleeding under traffic loads. The current typical emergency response, including deploying gritting vehicles to spread granite dust over melting asphalt, is a reactive, ad-hoc approach that treats symptoms rather than causes.

Various materials and technologies have been investigated to improve the resilience of asphalt pavements to high temperatures and climate-related deterioration. These include modified epoxy asphalt surfaces and modified epoxy chip seals, alongside fibre mastic asphalt, as potentially climate-resilient and long-life surfacing technologies. Advanced pavement materials, including polymer-modified binders and heat-reflective surface treatments, can improve resistance to temperature-related deterioration in vulnerable corridors. At the same time, solutions must look beyond passive protection and towards infrastructure that actively manages thermal conditions. Thermo-active road technology is an intriguing possibility, which uses embedded heat exchange loops to capture excess thermal energy from pavement surfaces during peak heat periods. By regulating pavement temperatures, these systems could reduce heat-induced damage while harvesting renewable thermal energy for beneficial reuse.

Metal bridges and other infrastructure assets are also susceptible to thermal stresses that can affect their long-term performance and safety. This is particularly important for older bridges, which may not have been designed for such extreme conditions. Bridges are designed to move, to accommodate expansion in hot weather and contraction in cold weather, as the temperature changes. With higher temperature extremes, this movement can be larger than anticipated by the designers, leading to the bridge expansion joints – which allow bridges to safely expand and contract – running out of travel and starting to stress bridge girders and decks. Bigger movements may also affect bridge bearings, road surfaces and bridge members.

Excessive thermal expansion of moveable (swing or lifting) bridges may prevent them from properly opening or closing, resulting in jamming. This happened to New York City’s Third Avenue Bridge in 2024, when extreme temperatures led to the bridge being stuck for hours. Concrete structures are also vulnerable because high temperatures can cause drying, exacerbating shrinkage, and worsening cracking, particularly where the concrete is already aged or poorly maintained. Extreme heat can also affect bridge bearings, bridge cables, drainage systems and protective coatings, causing materials such as rubber, polymers, and paints to degrade more quickly.   

In our railways, the metal rails (which, like road pavements, can reach temperatures in excess of 60C in direct sunlight on a hot day) tend to expand with increasing temperature. Modern rails are continuously welded into long lengths, which means that they are unable to expand hence develop internal compressive stresses at temperatures above 27C. If the track is not well-supported and/or there is a significant pre-existing imperfection, there is a risk that the track may buckle which could cause a train to derail. A further problem is that the overhead wires by which electrical current is conveyed to trains on overhead electrified railways also expands with increasing temperatures. Although equipped with automatic tensioning devices, these can run out of capacity at very high temperatures. The overhead lines may then sag to the extent that they become caught up by the current-collecting pantographs attached to trains. While constrained by materials technology, solutions can be found at system level for example by ensuring that track is well-supported both vertically and laterally, and investing for increased operational flexibility and the ability to carry out fast interventions.

Periods of sustained high temperatures are often also very dry. Hence prolonged heatwaves dry out vegetation and soils, increasing the risk and intensity of wildfires. When fires reach the wildland-urban interface, critical infrastructure, including power and communication towers, can be exposed to intense heat. This can affect the mechanical properties and load-bearing capacity of structural materials, potentially disrupting essential networks at precisely the time when communities are most vulnerable. We have seen in recent weeks how large fires near a major transport corridor can lead to its closure, whether it is a road or a railway.

As clay soils dry, they develop what is termed a ‘soil moisture deficit’ and shrink. This causes problems for roads and railways on clay soils and clay embankments. Shrinkage settlement of an underlying clay soil adversely affects railway track geometry and may lead to a loss of support, both of which increase the risk of track buckling. To mitigate this, sometimes disruptive speed restrictions are imposed. On roads, drying and shrinkage of the underlying ground leads to longitudinal tracks, rutting and bumpiness, as well as accelerating the rate of road surface deterioration. Drying-induced ground movements can also cause water pipes to fracture or break, leading to increased leakage rates.

Rising temperatures are also creating significant operational and occupational challenges for the construction sector, increasing risks to worker wellbeing while reducing productivity and affecting project delivery schedules. Construction workers are among the occupational groups most vulnerable to heat because of the physically demanding nature of their work, prolonged outdoor exposure, the use of personal protective equipment, and limited access to effective cooling measures. This results in high levels of fatigue, reduced concentration and heat-related illnesses, including dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

As the UK continues to experience increased temperatures, a more systematic approach to managing occupational heat risk is required, with clearer guidance, improved training and investment in practical adaptation measures. This will help protect workers’ health and safety while improving productivity, programme certainty and the long-term resilience of the construction industry.

The challenge is multifaceted, so needs to be addressed in a number of ways. By investing in more resilient designs capable of withstanding extreme environmental conditions, the UK can enhance infrastructure robustness to extreme heat stress. Improving the ability to predict failures and consequent disruptions will facilitate a proactive approach to enhance resilience. With this, there must come the ability to respond quickly and reconfigure the affected system(s) at national level. A combination of these elements can enhance infrastructure resilience to minimise disruption, protect public safety, reduce risks to workers and ensure that essential services continue to function effectively as heatwaves become more frequent and intense.

This article was co-authored by members of the UK Collaboratorium for Research in Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC)

Contributing authors

• Professor William Powrie, University of Southampton
• Professor Mehran Eskandari Torbaghan, University of Birmingham
• Dr Alba Fuertes, University Reading
• Dr Benyi Cao, Dr Yidu Bu and Dr Boulent Imam, University of Surrey