The role of Live Labs II in decarbonising transport

With the upcoming Live Labs 2 expo in Liverpool on March 25th, Mike Batheram, the Market Director for Local Transport in AtkinsRéalis, considers the challenges and opportunities for enabling the decarbonisation of transport and the contribution made by the Live Labs programme

Achieving sustainable growth is a significant challenge for the UK. According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK population is projected to increase to 72.5 million by 2032, and the UK Government has made ‘Kickstarting Economic Growth’ one of its 5 missions.

Many of the clients I talk to are increasingly questioning how they can balance the need for the new infrastructure that will be required to support growth, whilst maintaining their existing transport infrastructure and achieving the ambition of delivering a sustainable, low-carbon transport network. 

Transport infrastructure needs to be environmentally sustainable, resilient to the future impacts of climate change, and socially inclusive. However, this comes at a cost.

With local authorities facing increasingly challenging budget pressures, particularly in demand-led areas, such as children’s services, SEND services, and adult social care, it is becoming more difficult to make the case for additional investment to construct and maintain truly sustainable infrastructure. 

As transport continues to generate a quarter of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK, for many, much of the attention has been on reducing emissions by enabling the transition to electric vehicles, promoting active travel, and encouraging the use of public transport. But what about the carbon emissions from road construction, maintenance and transport infrastructure?

Firstly, we need to take a whole life carbon management approach to transport infrastructure to better understand the carbon emissions from building, maintaining and decommissioning. This will involve collaboration between local authorities and the wider supply chain to enable local authorities to fund and deliver sustainable infrastructure that decarbonises networks to meet climate targets and deliver broader place-based goals.

The 7 Live Labs 2 projects across the 4 themes of creating a UK centre of excellence for materials, looking at corridor and place-based decarbonisation, establishing a green carbon laboratory and delivering a future lighting testbed are exactly the type of collaborative efforts involving various local authorities and partners from the private sector that are needed.

The outputs from the Live Labs 2 projects, which are aimed at developing solutions to tackling this conundrum, should help other authorities address this challenge, but innovation also requires investment. Again, potentially, the programme’s approach of encouraging collaboration between the public and private sector, along with the £30m investment made by the Department for Transport into the programme, is aimed at enabling some of the solutions to come to fruition.

The Live Labs 2 programme will be sharing the outputs from the projects widely, following which success will partially depend on the ongoing adoption of these outputs and the ability to ensure highway maintenance and new schemes start to see the benefits from them.

But that’s not a case of the job being done. This needs to be coupled with clear guidance on scheme funding. Some of this was promised in the anticipated Local Transport Plan (LTP 4) guidance in the form of business cases and LTPs containing Quantifiable Carbon Reduction to enable places to understand the baseline local transport emissions and estimate the carbon impacts of proposed interventions as part of the development of an LTP.

However, the guidance is still being developed. While some local authorities have included the ambition to incorporate decarbonisation into their LTPs, the absence of clear guidance has not helped the process and led to different approaches being adopted in different locations.

The other consideration is the duration of funding settlements. Multi-year funding creates opportunities for clients and their supply chains to work together to improve long-term, strategic planning and delivery that can enable efficiencies, innovation, investment in employment and skills, improve health and safety and customer satisfaction, and achieve net zero objectives.

Many LHAs have lost key skills over recent years and long-term funding settlements can enable better resource planning to address gaps in local authority and supply chain capacity. 

Finally, let’s also not forget that while the Live Labs 2 programme is focussed on transport interventions, ADEPT as an organisation encompasses place, which includes housing and social infrastructure. So, there may also be an opportunity for sharing learning from the programme, to inform low carbon solutions to support the construction of housing developments, care homes, hospitals and schools. 

Decarbonising transport will require us to think inclusively, work together and ensure we are focussed on realising the broader benefits of innovation.

AtkinsRéalis will be at the Live Labs 2 Expo in Liverpool on 25th March 2025. We will be demonstrating our insights engine on our stand, a tool to help prioritise infrastructure investments, model project costs and budgets and map the impacts of climate resilience on transport infrastructure.