Building the National Underground Asset Register

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Markets

Buildings & places
Location

England, Wales and Northern Ireland
Client

Geospatial Commission
Collaborators

Ordnance Survey, 1Spatial, GeoPlace, The Greater London Authority
Completion date

Ongoing

Guy Ledger

Divisional Digital Director, contact form

Developing a bespoke digital solution to securely map the UK’s underground assets.

Pretty much every construction project starts with a hole in the ground. But before you start digging, you need to know what is buried there.

There are estimated to be 4 million kilometers of buried pipes and cables in the UK, including telecoms and internet, gas, water, and electricity. Unfortunately for anyone digging, there is no centralized database to show you where all these underground obstructions are, forcing anyone who wishes to safely dig to seek records from every possible asset owner in the area.

Every year there are estimated to be 60,000 utility strikes, where construction and maintenance workers accidently damage underground assets. This is a huge problem: endangering the lives of those digging, delaying construction; disrupting traffic; and causing interruption to essential services such as power, water, gas and telecoms. In fact, the economic cost to the UK of the disruption caused by utility strikes is estimated to be £2.4bn a year.

We are delighted with the news that the MVP is now expanding across the country sooner than planned, marking a significant step towards a smarter and more resilient future.

Heidi Mottram

Chief Executive, Northumbrian Water

A window to the world beneath our feet

The National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) is being created to help with the challenges surrounding data sharing, by aggregating England, Wales and Northern Ireland’s underground assets into a single centralized database (Scotland manages their data separately). AtkinsRéalis was selected as the delivery partner for the build phase of this project following a discovery phase in which the project’s feasibility and economic case were explored and established.

This complex project has three main challenges: to engage with and collect data from over 700 asset owners; to transform and ingest this data into a single comprehensive database; and to develop a secure portal through which users can view and access this information.

With any project of this scale and ambition, some degree of industry skepticism about deliverability is likely. Consequently, we were expecting to see some reluctance to share data. However, NUAR was predicted to reduce the costs of data-sharing by an estimated £91m a year, by reducing the amount of time and resources asset owners and other stakeholders would have to spend making and answering queries. Understanding of this benefit, but also the safety benefits to staff of having all the information instantly and easily available in one place, has resulted in a good take-up from utilities providers - particularly the major ones in the energy, water and telecommunications sectors. This allowed us to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) in spring 2023, which is now live across England and Wales. As more asset owners are onboarded, we have also begun to see a snowball effect, with the value to asset owners of sharing data with NUAR increasing with each provider we have signed up.

The user portal has been developed collaboratively with users from the very beginning as the first users have been onboarded. This is an ongoing process, with the team using a combination of user conversations, testing, and focus groups to help us develop a bespoke solution that will allow these users to access this critical infrastructure data securely and efficiently. Particular focus has gone into making it easy to use on a mobile, based on feedback that this will be a significant proportion of the user base.

The continued updating of the NUAR platform and expansion of the MVP area gives asset owners the confidence that those enquiring about asset locations will have the available tools at their fingertips to plan accordingly.

Colin Sawkins

Assurance and Enabling Specialist, Cadent Gas

A standard format for underground asset data

When we began working on NUAR, there was no standard format for sharing underground asset information in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. As a result, asset owners currently hold their records in a wide variety of different formats, from custom-built databases to non-vectorized PDF files. This posed a significant technical challenge when importing this data.

To build a single harmonized map of underground assets, all data had to be converted into a common standard format. This had to be done on a massive scale, with data coming from hundreds of asset owning organizations, and it also had to be easily repeatable, so that when asset owners updated their records these changes could flow through to the NUAR platform. This required efficient and sustainable methods of data transformation.

We brought data transformation specialists 1Spatial into the team to help address this challenge – developing and adapting a range of tools to manage this data transformation and minimize the need for human intervention. We also created an API (or Application Programming Interface) which is being tested by a small subset of early adopter asset owners to enable a more automated way of providing data to NUAR.

Image of National Underground Asset Register web-portal. A map of a street with utilities marked in red and a legend

Delivering the National Underground Asset Register

The first MVP release of NUAR went live in April 2023, and now covers all of England and Wales, with Northern Ireland due to go live next spring. This MVP was delivered on time and on budget. NUAR will be fully operational across England, Wales and Northern Ireland by 2025.

The project has already seen significant traction, with the platform already including data from over 170 asset owners, including all of the major energy and water providers, such as Welsh Water, Cadent Gas and UK Power Networks, several major telecommunications companies, including CityFibre and Virgin Media O2, as well as smaller providers of these services, transport organizations and local authorities.

Overall, NUAR is forecast to save the UK an estimated £490m per year, an impressive 36x return on investment. This will be seen through increased efficiency, reduced asset strikes (when underground pipes and cables are accidentally damaged) and reduced disruptions for the public and businesses. It is also hoped that the project will have a positive impact on carbon emissions, though this has not been tested or quantified at this time.

Most importantly, by providing a reliable map of the world beneath our feet, NUAR will make construction projects safer and reduce the number of injuries and near misses on worksites across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Find out more about our digital capabilities About Delivering the National Underground Asset Register

We are delighted with the news that the MVP is being rolled out and expanded across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, marking a significant contribution towards a standard and consistent process for sharing of safe digging data.

Nigel Myers

Senior Statutory and Streetworks Manager, Virgin Media O2

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