The utility infrastructure in the UK is vulnerable to crises.

A major new inquiry has revealed that the UK’s utility networks, including water and electricity supplies, are vulnerable to severe disruption including system failure, climate change and terrorism.

The investigation, State of the Nation: Defending Critical Infrastructure, has been carried out by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), which interviewed and collated information from more than 70 different sources.

The report cites examples of vulnerabilities within the UK’s infrastructure, including the flooding of an atomic weapons establishment in 2007, which posed a potential threat to public health, and the flooding of a water treatment works that left 350,000 people without water for 17 days.

Alan Stilwell, leader of ICE’s inquiry, commented: “We should be under no illusions – there are dangerous weaknesses in our critical infrastructure and utilities networks that need to be addressed.

“We need to recognise that the UK’s infrastructure assets form an interdependent network, in which a single failure can cascade across the network rendering otherwise unaffected sectors inoperable. Put simply – a water treatment plant cannot function without electricity and an electricity production plant cannot function without water.”

ICE has made the recommendation that there needs to be one single point of authority dealing with utility infrastructure issues.

According to the UK security service MI5, the country’s current terrorism threat level is classed as ‘severe’. To address this, there already exists the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) to reduce terrorism and security threats to the UK’s utility infrastructure, however no one central authority currently deals with climate change or system failures.

Stilwell explained: “What is needed most of all is a single point of authority for infrastructure resilience – be it a Resilience Tsar, a new body or an existing body with expanded remit – which has responsibility for coordinating the work of the numerous agencies currently dealing with individual sectors and threats and promotes this essential concept of interdependency.”