Is Britain's utilities infrastructure fit for purpose?

Matt Wheeldon, Infrastructure Development Director at Wessex Water, points out that new homes are still being built the same wasteful way as old ones. Getting water into a typical home, he says, given an average pumping head of 100 metres, costs enough energy per person per day to be the equivalent of lifting a bag of sugar twice the height of Everest. Current solutions to storm overflows, he argues, are making the carbon problem worse, not better. 

Davide Turi, E.ON‘s Innovation Lead for flexibility, points to a similar gap on the demand side. E.ON estimates local grids face 3.7 gigawatts of constraints as homes switch to heat pumps and EVs – fixing that through new infrastructure alone, he says, would cost billions. A battery is the cheap way out of that bill: charge overnight, discharge at peak, and the network never has to be built for the peak in the first place. 

Chris Walters, Interim Chief Executive of Ofwat, told us the Environment Agency  is preparing for a 1-in-500-year drought by 2040, and a daily shortfall of 5 billion litres of water by 2055. £104 billion of investment has already been approved. But it only closes a third of the gap. 

James Earl, who runs Future Energy Networks, points to strain of a different kind. Some businesses are now choosing gas connections over electricity, he said, because grid connection queues are running up to 15 years. 

Jonathan Wisdom, who leads balancing services at NESO, shared that NESO’s job is keeping today’s system running while planning tomorrow’s – “and that means everything needs to work holistically.” Doing that means growing electricity flexibility fivefold by 2030, he says. The technology’s ready. What NESO lacks, by design, is a direct relationship with most of the businesses whose flexibility it needs. 

Josh Buckland, EDF‘s Director of Strategy and policy, argues that Britain builds nuclear the wrong way. Hinkley Point C’s second reactor is already running 20-30% more efficiently than the first, purely from lessons carried across the build. He says the UK’s habit of treating each reactor as a one-off project, rather than building in sequence, is a large part of why nuclear stays expensive here. 

Alanna Gluck, Engagement Lead for the CReDo infrastructure resilience project, highlights how energy and water price control cycles run on entirely different timelines, which makes joined-up infrastructure investment difficult even for companies that want it. Her CReDo co-lead, Amit Bhave, questions how the system assesses risk in the first place. Two substations can carry identical scores on paper. If one of them also feeds a hospital, the consequences of it failing are far greater than the score suggests, and most infrastructure planning still doesn’t account for that. 

Emma Fletcher, Innovation Director at Octopus Energy, addressed how options for flats and high-density housing remain unsolved. Ownership is unclear, outdoor space is minimal, and cooling in summer is becoming as pressing a problem as heating in winter. “Nobody’s got a perfect solution,” she says.