Featured in our publication, RePower London, Holger Kessler of AtkinsRéalis discusses the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR), an interactive digital map of underground pipes and cables.

I often find myself thinking back to an infamous beer advert from the 90s. A man in a high-vis jacket eagerly jumps out of a van and approaches a construction crew, digging a hole in a busy urban street. “I’ve got an idea, while you’ve got that open, we can lay our new gas main?” “What a good idea” another man replies, “that would save digging the road up again and causing the public more inconvenience!” Within minutes, their trench is packed with several crews, all working together to install their respective pipes and cables simultaneously.

But, to truly deliver this collaborative, less disruptive utopia, we need to get everyone working together much earlier in the process!

A key barrier has always been that the pipes and cables that transport our electricity, gas, water and data, are owned and operated
 by a myriad of public and private sector organisations. There are estimated to be around 4 million kilometres of underground pipes and cables across the UK, owned by over 700 different companies! Each of these underground asset owners are legally required to share location data for the purposes of ‘safe digging’, but there is currently no standardised method to do this, with multiple organisations having to be contacted for every dig, who all provide their information in completely different formats.

As a result, a 2022 consultation found that it takes excavators 6.1 days on average, to receive and process all the data needed to work safely. There are then around 60,000 accidental strikes on these pipes and cables every year, putting workers’ lives at risk; disrupting the public and business; and costing the UK economy £2.4 billion every year.

That’s why the Geospatial Commission and delivery partner AtkinsRéalis are building the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR), an interactive digital map of underground pipes and cables that standardises, centralises and makes data from hundreds of organisations available for authorised street works users, instantly.

An initial version of NUAR is already available across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but the service is on track to be fully operational by the end of 2025, delivering over £400 million of annual economic growth, by increasing efficiency and reducing accidental damage and disruption.

The NUAR team have worked extremely hard to bring the asset owner community on this journey, but ultimately, the project has only come to life because hundreds of major energy and water providers, telecommunication companies, transport organisations and local authorities have voluntarily signed-up to the service and started sharing their data. Nothing could have been achieved without their trust, collaborative spirit and shared vision of a better way.

So, what can we learn from our beer advert, 30 years later?

Well, NUAR is just one example of a much wider point, which is right at the heart of the future of our cities. Reducing waste, disruption, accidents, will only work if we work together; and many of the solutions that we think of as technological, are ultimately about collaboration. “What a good idea”!