This month CECA responded to the consultation on the future of the Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development (RAPID), calling for stronger national coordination, earlier supply-chain involvement and a clearer route from strategic need to construction.
Industry is preparing to deliver a major programme of reservoirs, transfers, recycling facilities, wastewater projects and other resilience infrastructure. Many of these schemes will cross company, regional and regulatory boundaries and take more than one asset management period to plan, approve and build.
CECA therefore supports national oversight of strategic water infrastructure from conception to delivery. However, in our response, developed with members of CECA’s Water Group, we emphasised that this must simplify the process, rather than introduce another layer of bureaucracy.
CECA set out the following headline recommendations:
- a single integrated regulatory and delivery plan for every project;
- consolidated regulatory feedback and one-submission-multiple-use evidence;
- published gate acceptance criteria and decision timescales;
- structured early contractor and specialist-supplier involvement;
- a credible national project and procurement pipeline which sets clear objectives/targets for supporting locally-based contractors/suppliers and creating social value;
- clear escalation, funding-continuity and risk-allocation arrangements;
- a transparent framework for prioritising and sequencing projects, supported by regular portfolio-level deliverability assessments developed with the supply chain;
- selective, phased and properly resourced expansion of RAPID’s remit, based on published entry and exit criteria and independently evaluated against its costs and benefits.
CECA also recommended that RAPID’s assurance process should test whether meaningful Early Contractor Involvement has taken place and whether delivery advice has influenced the project, and argued that successful outcomes will be driven by the supply chain’s early involvement. We also said that major schemes should undergo independent constructability reviews involving people with experience of delivering comparable infrastructure.
The industry will need to invest in recruitment, training, specialist equipment, manufacturing capacity and innovation to deliver the planned pipeline of work in the sector – but the necessary investment by industry will depend on sufficient levels of confidence that planned projects will progress.
CECA believes RAPID should therefore publish a regularly updated national programme setting out each project’s development stage, planning and consenting route, procurement approach, market-engagement dates, anticipated construction period and level of delivery confidence.
The test of RAPID’s future role for CECA members will be whether it reduces duplication, resolves problems earlier and helps projects progress more efficiently. With the right remit and resources, it can provide the coordination and delivery focus needed to turn England’s water infrastructure plans into a credible programme of construction.
CECA would like to thank those members who directly contributed to this consultation response, which can be read in full in the members’ area of the CECA website. If you are a CECA member and would like to know more, contact enquiries@ceca.co.uk.