Politics Home | Operational national infrastructure systems: maintain, repair, refurbish, renew versus cost, value and investment

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The infrastructure systems that support society, and for which all of us individually pay, are rightly the subject of continual public scrutiny. These infrastructure systems may be categorised as ‘economic’ (including transport, energy, water, waste, and information and computing technology) and ‘social’ (including health, education and justice). Contemporary concerns around the economic infrastructure systems focus on affordability, interrupted service delivery and the ageing of the physical infrastructure along with the adverse social, environmental and economic consequences that result. Many of society’s current challenges are considered to result from inefficient or ineffective infrastructure systems, with the economic infrastructures typically featuring as much as the social. The poor state of our roads (encapsulated by potholes), the unreliability and expense of public transport, the environmental pollution deriving from our combined waste (sewage) and surface water drainage systems, and solid waste systems that fail to eradicate littering and fly tipping are presented to our politicians and civil servants as issues requiring prioritised action. Civil engineers have the skills, experience, remit and above all responsibility for designing and delivering the necessary improvements.

The state of the economy is crucial to this discourse. Maintenance of our ageing physical infrastructures is viewed simply as a cost – a drain on resources, politically uninteresting and an expense that would, if spent otherwise, deliver political capital. This view is economically and societally damaging and does not accurately reflect the true situation. Timely maintenance is essential: there is a ‘rule of thumb’ that repair costs ten times as much as timely maintenance, and renewal ten times as much as repair. A simple example of this is a steel bridge: if protected against corrosion by timely, regular painting, it will last indefinitely. If we decide to take a ‘maintenance holiday’ and cease painting, before long we will be replacing the bridge. In roads, maintaining the tarmacadam ‘wearing course’, should avoid water ingress and damage to the sub-base, which results in large surface deformations (or rutting) that require expensive reconstruction. Refurbishment of existing infrastructure to a higher standard of capacity, resilience or service support may also be more cost-effective than conventional rebuilding or replacement. Effective maintenance, refurbishment and planned renewal as well as avoiding the considerable economic and social harm of major service disruption caused by emergency repairs can contribute to economic activity in terms of jobs and technologies, and should be embraced as an opportunity rather than a burden.

As a start, we need to change the language of the discourse from cost to value, and from expense to investment. Investment is naturally associated with creating something better and fit for the future; something forward looking, from which multiple benefits will accrue if creatively and systemically applied. The need for better operational infrastructure is there: climate hazards, uses that were unanticipated, and demand for capacity exceeding engineering solutions all of which reduce design life significantly. There are many opportunities now available both to deliver more sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems and manifestly improved infrastructure system services. This is the goal UKCRIC has set itself to deliver.

One of the most important innovations of the 19th Century was the provision of sanitation (the safe disposal of wastewater) alongside the supply of clean water, which served to dramatically improve the health of the UK’s population. Joseph Bazalgette’s brick-lined sewer and wastewater systems in London stand out as politically valuable investments, and are still the backbone of London’s wastewater system today. Their design, being egg-shaped to cater for different volumes of flow and allowing people to enter them for maintenance purposes, enabled their continuing use in the face of a vastly increasing population. An equally impressive super sewer, the Thames Tideway Tunnel, has recently been created to provide adequate far-future capacity, hence resilience for the system and to overcome one of the philosophical limitations of the original, which was not to separate foul water from surface run-off. However, more generally across the UK, the sewer and wastewater systems are in need of maintenance and often (at short notice) repair, yet this action and expense, although an investment, does not attract political cachet.

Rather than like-for-like pipeline replacement, a whole industry has grown up around the trenchless relining and upsizing of pipelines – examples of refurbishment and renewal. Refurbishment leads to enhanced operational and structural performance, making the pipe networks fit for the future and creating a whole new investment proposition. The inclusion of embedded sensors and/or autonomous sensing monitoring the system provides a further radical enhancement, enabling deterioration or damage to be identified immediately and rectified by maintenance before damaging and disruptive failure requiring a disruptive repair or renewal occurs. This delivers functional enhancement and resilience, evident additional value, a strong sense of investment rather than expense, and political kudos.

A newly constructed or full-width reconstruction of a road, with freshly painted road markings, is costly but can be presented as evidence of investment with associated political value. However, technology has developed to the point where full-width excavation of an asphalt road surface, heating and mixing with the addition of new materials to rejuvenate the asphalt, relaying and compaction can be carried out in an almost continuous, seamless process. A refurbished road would transform a cracked and potholed surface, with multiple utility cuts and evident signs of ageing, into something that looks newly constructed and provides a smooth riding surface. If this were combined with future proofing of the buried infrastructure – planned maintenance and refurbishment in advance of the surface rejuvenation, combined perhaps with the provision of additional capacity in the form of ducts for future use and a commitment to the future use of trenchless technologies in anything other than wholly exceptional circumstances – the investment case will be strengthened and the political value enhanced.

These things are all possible and could start to be implemented now: what’s stopping us is an adherence to out of date contractual arrangements and artificial systems boundaries.