Regulation & Resilience

Effective policies and regulation are needed to help infrastructure sectors to prepare for an uncertain future.

Updated:

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Summary

To ensure the UK’s infrastructure is prepared for the major challenges of the future – such as the impacts of climate change and population growth - those planning and running key systems and services need clear policy direction and long term objectives. They also need to work within a regulatory system that supports these aims.

This is particularly important when it comes to further enhancing the resilience of our vital infrastructure.
The UK needs infrastructure systems which are resilient to future challenges including environmental threats like climate change. At the same time infrastructure systems need to be built and operated to repair past damage to the environment and deliver environmental improvements in the future.
In January 2022 the previous Government published a policy paper in response to the recommendations the Commission made in its regulation study in 2019. This committed the Government to issuing additional strategic guidance to regulators, reviewing their duties and exploring using competition for strategic investments, in line with the Commission’s report.
Improving the resilience of infrastructure to the impacts from climate change is one of the strategic themes shaping the Commission’s second National Infrastructure Assessment. The report highlights that infrastructure and the environment are interdependent. Infrastructure reliability is threatened by environmental risks, while infrastructure systems can also affect the environment. In addition to specific recommendations on the resilience of specific sectors, the Assessment also recommends:

  • setting national standards for how different infrastructure services should operate in the face of different challenges (that might be a storm, power cuts, flooding etc)
  • giving regulators the powers to ensure that when they make future agreements with infrastructure companies about their future investment plans, those plans are consistent to meet these national resilience standards
  • regular ‘stress testing’ of infrastructure systems by operators, under the watchful eye of the regulators – not just for testing the performance of individual systems, but also testing for the risk of ‘cascading’ failures
  • ensuring engineering standards for new infrastructure take into account future climate chang
  • requiring infrastructure operators to estimate the cost of maintaining resilience standards between now and 2050.

In September 2024, the Commission published a report showing gaps in the current resilience standards, and setting out the routes by which government could develop a framework of national resilience standards in line with our Assessment recommendation.

Along with our related work, such as on financing nuclear projects, we seek to chart how government, regulators and relevant sectors might create the best environment to enable market-led solutions for securing sustainable and reliable infrastructure which addresses the UK’s future needs.

Regulation & resilience data

Data sets relating to infrastructure regulation and resilience are available to review on our Data pages.  The data can be reviewed online or downloaded.

Review data

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