It is estimated that accidental underground utility strikes cost the UK economy £2.4 billion every year. A top priority of the the Geospatial Commission, an agency of the UK government tasked with extracting more value from government geospatial data, is the creation of a National Underground Asset Registry (NUAR) and to complete the national implementation of NUAR across England, Wales and Northern Ireland by 2024. The Geospatial Commission has just published the economic case for NUAR which estimates conservatively a return on investment (ROI) of £30 worth of benefits for every £1 invested in a national register for capturing and sharing digital underground asset data. The economic analysis concludes that there is a robust economic case for NUAR.
Background
Knowing the location of buried utility assets, such as cables, pipes, sewers, and ducts prior to initiating excavation, or even better, prior to design helps avoid costly damage to assets, and improves safety for workers and the general public.
Major issues in many jurisdictions including the UK are data quality and data access. Data is often privately owned and access is restricted, data is not collected consistently, the level of accuracy varies, and data is often missing or out of date. This means that outages occur more frequently and last longer than they should, projects take longer and start later, cause more disruption to the public and cost more.
In addition utility business models provide no direct incentives to improve their data at the scale required for a full solution. However, the government is able to centrally co-ordinate and invest upfront in whole scale data transformation where there is clear evidence of value to the UK economy, and it can also ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to address commercial and security concerns of efficient, digital data access.
The NUAR initiative grew out of a bottom-up collaboration among actual asset owners and the organizations involved in working on maintaining embedded asset networks in the North East of England and in Central London. Feedback from the field was that with the practices currently in place data delivered inconsistently in terms of scale and content making it difficult to integrate and interpret the data in the field. The strong message from the asset owners and those responsible for maintaining the assets was that a simpler, comprehensive, and standardized approach was required.
The NUAR project was formally initiated by the Geospatial Commission, which is part of the Cabinet Office at the heart of the UK government. While NUAR is being driven from government, this is very much picking up on a bottom-up requirement. Together in North East England and Central London some 40 utility and telecom network operators and local government agencies voluntarily collaborated to share their data using a harmonized data model and symbology to enable viewing all underground utilities on a single map. A database was created in which each data owner remained a steward of its own data, a scheme for data protection and security was implemented, and access was provided via a data hub available to all participants.
The experience of government agencies and network owners in collaborating to share underground infrastructure information using a risk-based legal approach to data protection and security on the two pilots leading up to the Invitation to Tender, suggests that it will be feasible for NUAR, which is not intended to be mandatory, to be based on a secure and trusted data sharing between the public and private sector. From a security perspective the prototype system developed for the pilots adhered to strict security standards and audit controls set by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) as well as Ordnance Survey guidelines. In addition the prototype implemented data protection, for example, by restricting the size of the area for which data could be requested. This attention to data protection was key in achieving what had not been possible in previous projects with a similar objective - all 35 public and private sector organizations participating in the pilots signed data sharing agreements after review by their legal departments.
A key feature of the prototype system developed for the pilots was support for feedback from the field. Referred to as "observations" it made it possible for field staff to report errors by comparing the actual location of equipment with what was recorded in the database. A more complete implementation of this important capability could become a key mechanism for improving data quality.
Return on investment (ROI) studies of the benefits of improving the mapping underground infrastructure on highway construction projects conducted since the late 1990s have consistently revealed a large return-on-investment. A U.S. Department of Transportation sponsored survey conducted by Purdue University in 1999 of quantifiable and qualitative savings estimated a total of US$4.62 in avoided costs for every US$1.00 spent on accurately locating underground infrastructure. Although qualitative savings (for example, avoided impacts on nearby homes and businesses) were not directly measurable, the researchers made the case that those savings were significant, and many times more valuable than the quantifiable savings. In 2007, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation commissioned Pennsylvania State University to study the savings on Pennsylvania highway projects and found a return on investment of US$21.00 saved for every US$1.00 spent for SUE when elevating the quality level of subsurface utility information using SUE. This significantly higher return on investment when compared to Purdue study is the result of maturation of process and a consideration of some of the qualitative savings in the Purdue study.
Overview of Analysis
The total cost of utility strikes is estimated to be £2.4 billion per year. This is based on the assumption that there are 4 million excavations and 60,000 utility strikes per year in the UK. However, analysis by the Geospatial Commission has determined the number of excavations could be as high as 4.7 million a year. Assuming the ratio between excavations and strikes is the same, this implies that the total number of annual strikes could be 70,000. Using the average direct cost of a strike £3,371 from academic research, it is estimated that annual direct costs amount to £79 million. Using the 29x ratio reported by researchers at the University of Birmingham , indirect costs are estimated to be £2.31 billion.
To estimate the benefits of the program, it was assumed that 30% of strikes could be avoided through better data and easier access to it. On-site project savings are derived from three areas: the cost of resuming projects after discovering unexpected underground assets, the cost of abandoning projects due to constraints from unexpected underground assets, and field efficiencies from a single, integrated view of all the underground assets. The data exchange and back office efficiency estimates are based on research commissioned by the Geospatial Commission to understand the detailed processes currently involved in requesting, collating and preparing underground asset data and how NUAR would make it more efficient. The total quantitative benefit of the NUAR program is estimated at £3.4 billion, or £347 million annually over ten years.
- Savings from reduced utility strikes, saving £240 million/year
- Data exchange and back office efficiency, saving £91 million/year
- On-site construction efficiency improvements, saving £16 million/year
In addition there are other benefits of the program that are not currently quantifiable, such as strategic improvements to street works coordination and subsurface planning.
Conclusions
The study concluded that there is a strong case for government intervention since the market has failed to fix itself. The conservative estimate of a return on investment of £30 worth of benefits for every £1 invested in a national register is very high but is not inconsistent with previous ROI studies. The main conclusion of the analysis is that there is a robust economic case for NUAR and that the project delivers on announced government policy.
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