Resilient as standard – Developing resilience standards and capital maintenance plans
How might we create common resilience standards and develop capital maintenance plans for the water sector?
One of the biggest challenges that the water sector is grappling with is ensuring it can provide water and wastewater services that are resilient in the face of future challenges, including climate change and supporting the government's growth ambitions. This is compounded by activity levels being below the long-term sustainable rate.
The challenge for this Sprint is to Develop a framework for creating resilience standards and capital maintenance plans that will deliver a balance between resilience and risk that society is willing to accept and generate the evidence base needed to justify customers funding the investment needed to deliver the proposals.
By the end of the sprint, we aim to deliver:
- Principles for defining resilience standards.
- A set of prioritised areas to set resilience standards for.
- A conceptual framework for defining resilience standards and identifying the evidence needed.
- An approach to how companies should companies build and evidence a bottom-up capital maintenance plan that can deliver these standards and puts the water sector on a sound long-term footing.
Together, we will do the following in each area.
Resilience standards:
- Develop principles for setting resilience standards.
- Create a long list of areas of services the sector delivers and identify shocks and trends that service provision needs to be resilient to.
- Prioritise a short list of resilience standards for initial focus, considering impact on customers and the environment, and deliverability.
- Explore the available data and evidence for a sample of priority areas and identify what additional evidence is needed to set resilience standards.
- Reflect on this practical experience to design a conceptual framework for defining resilience standards.
Capital maintenance plans:
- Explore the core components of a good plan - what does the plan need to do/deliver?
- What are the options for how you do it and what evidence is needed to support them - is the common framework part of answer?
- What principles should be used to decide which approach should be used for different asset types / activities
Participants will collaborate through a series of structured and interactive sessions to:
- Day 1: Start with Why – Explore the problem we are trying to solve with resilience standards. Develop principles for standards, including considering ISO2237:2025 Security and resilience.
- Day 2: Protect and serve – Identify the services water companies provides, the risks to providing those services that we need to protect from and identify key priorities. We will then explore data and evidence for a sample of potential resilience standards.
- Day 3: Shift to planning mode – we will close off the discussion on resilience standards and seek to create a standardised model for resilience standards building on the work undertaken. We will then move on to considering the capital maintenance plan and considering what it needs to achieve to be successful in delivering these standards and creating a sustainable basis for the maintenance of assets.
- Day 4: Making it real – we will explore how we might go about developing a high-quality capital maintenance plan that delivers the right objectives for customers and the environment. It will consider how/whether this approach needs to vary by activity or asset type.
- Water company and partner organisation employees working on capital maintenance, asset health, resilience and regulation.
- Regulators, and Government, through progressing the development of resilience standards, which are a central element of the vision for the reformed regulatory framework for water.
- Anyone who feels they can contribute to a better understanding of how to make resilience and improved capital maintenance plans tangible for the water sector.
Any questions: contact - Geoff Randall: Geoffrey.Randall@nwl.co.uk