The Lower Thames Crossing (LTC) are developing a new road that will connect Kent and Essex through a tunnel beneath the River Thames, strengthening the orbital motorway around London. The new route will almost double road capacity over the river east of London to reduce congestion and give millions of people more choice on where they live, work and spend their valuable time.
Environmental, social and financial sustainability are key principles of the programme and are supporting the objective to become “Britain’s greenest road”. The intention is to ensure that these principles are carried forward throughout the life of the project. As such, the resulting infrastructure will be regulated and the asset owner will need to adopt leading asset management practices. Our challenge was to support the design of the regulatory and business planning regimes to ensure that the sustainable principles are embedded into the new organisational structures.
Our initial focus was to design the asset health measures that the regulator could use to ensure that the asset base was being effectively, efficiently and sustainably maintained over the long-term. As such, we identified the key assets that impacted on serviceability and then used risk maps to identify the asset health measures that align to the serviceability measures. At this stage, we reviewed and consolidated the existing measures into a more suitable and more holistic Service Measure Framework (SMF).
We then developed criteria to select a set of suitable measures and integrated these into the wider SMF. We tested the measures on existing asset data to check their validity.
Our work progressed to review the current plans for the regulatory framework, control, ESG reporting, and business planning to ensure that our work dove-tailed with other initiatives. As such, we made recommendations on how the programme should be regulated and how the asset owner should plan for future investments.
A novel approach to developing asset health measures for regulatory and investment planning was developed. The measures were tested and integrated into a regulatory framework that has the optimum balance of incentives and controls to ensure long-term sustainability of the asset base.
