The Resilience Series was conceived by Prospect with one simple aim—to better understand how the UK can strengthen its critical infrastructure. From water supply to energy production, from data centres to defence, and from transport to digital infrastructure, how do we deliver greater resilience?
The aim may be simple to articulate but the solutions are less easy to distil and implement. Solutions are difficult because of the complex array of systems, processes and networks that lie at the heart of each challenge. Difficult, too, when laudable goals—climate change mitigation and value for money, for example—often work in friction.
Nevertheless, ideas abound. Across eight roundtable discussions over the course of 2026, core themes emerged and insights were shared among expert voices representing the public, industry, policymakers and others.
Over the following pages, we’ll consider each topic in turn but here are some of the key thoughts drawn from all eight subject areas.
1. Resilience isn’t an absolute...
It requires trade-offs and a recognition that money and resources are finite. The need for protection must be weighed against risk appetite, and both must be assessed against realistic budgets. While each sector has its own compromises to make, these trade-offs are perhaps best understood by way of the energy “trilemma” where industry and policymakers seek to balance security of supply with environmental sustainability and affordability. As one of our roundtable speakers observed, when you “turn the dial” on one, it impacts the other two. Hard choices are required. When a similar assessment is applied to communications networks, providers have to decide whether consumers will be willing to pay an extra £15-£20 a month in pursuit of perfection. Most providers have concluded that they won’t. Compromise, however politically unpalatable, is a reality.
2… and it isn’t achieved in a vacuum
As one expert guest put it during our transport roundtable, “Resilience isn’t a single intervention. It’s a discipline that should be embedded in the transport lifecycle, not treated as an afterthought”. Those tempted to treat resilience in isolation are urged, instead, to “bake” it into the process. Similarly, a balance needs to be struck between centralised and decentralised decision-making. This is told most starkly through the history of the NHS, which has undergone regular systems change since its creation in the 1940s. The result? Silos and fragmentation, on the one hand, and central government overreach and a lack of sensitivity to local needs on the other.
3. An infrastructure shock in one arena requires resilience elsewhere
When the energy system suffers an outage, the communications network has an essential role to play. The latter is a vital component in the restitution of the former. Interdependencies exist elsewhere across UK infrastructure, underlining the need for integration and coordination not just within sectors but across them, too, if cascading failures are to be avoided. The UK may be “good at understanding individual assets”, but there remains a failure to understand how discrete parts of the industrial ecosystem work together. Without necessary integration between and across critical infrastructure, the UK’s response to system shocks will remain reactive, not proactive.
4. Effective communication matters
Whether designed to nudge consumer behaviour, galvanise industry engagement or manage expectations about what is possible, efforts at strengthening UK infrastructure are unlikely to succeed without clear, direct and accessible communication. Communication is perhaps most difficult when explaining the absence, rather than the presence, of something. In defence spending, for example, significant investment in redundancy is often essential to prevent an attack. Here, as elsewhere, simplified messaging counts. “If you can’t put it on the front of a T-shirt, you can’tsell it”.
Without necessary integration between and across critical infrastructure, the UK’s response to system shocks will remain reactive, not proactive
5. Investment today is likely to pay off tomorrow
Investment in long-term objectives is not always an easy argument to make (see lesson 7). However, sensible spending today is likely to pay off tomorrow. In the context of water resilience, for example, those responsible for policy are urged to consider infrastructure not as a “cost centre” but as an “economic multipler” where “every pound spent on resilience today would avoid multiple pounds in the future”. A similar argument can be made for transport, health, digital infrastructure and so on.
6. Diversification strengthens resilience
An ecosystem of interconnected systems always trumps a single network. A varied transport network, for example, reduces the pressure on one mode of transport, limiting downtime and mitigating damaging effects on the wider economy. Similarly, diversity of power sources—think solar, sea, wind and nuclear—has strengthened the UK’s energy ecosystem in a new way. This alone doesn’t ensure resilience but it is a necessary, and increasingly important, pre-requisite for stronger infrastructure.
7. Success requires patience
Long-term commitments don’t always sit comfortably with our parliamentary democracy, especially where large sums of money are involved. A tendency towards short-termism, a byproduct of the electoral cycle, remains the enemy of effective implementation. Consider this in the context of addressing a looming water supply crisis (an estimated five-billion-litres-a-day shortfall of public water supplies by 2055) or a rail network overhaul required to counter the flooding impacts of climate change. Cross-party consensus, and an acknowledgment that the benefits of decisions taken today will be realised long after the current crop of politicians are out of power, is the only way to achieve substantive change. Patience, in other words.
About the Prospect Resilience Series
Running from January to September 2026, each event in the series examined a vital system or risk domain through the lens of preparedness, coordination, innovation and investment. The series covered the following topics: water supply, water waste management, energy supply, digital infrastructure, transport, health, defence and data centres. Exploration of each topic centred on an in-person roundtable discussion lasting 90 minutes and featuring expert voices representing industry, policymakers, citizens, academia and other interested parties. Convened in association with a partner organisation, each roundtable was conducted under the Chatham House rule.
One of the enemies of resilience is politics. It is obvious, isn’t it, that we would want critical infrastructure to be resilient rather than fragile. Everyone would agree to that, so why is a problem so profound that it was worth organising a whole series, that took in the water supply, energy production, data centres, defence and transport? It was worth doing because the operation of ordinary democratic politics makes the question of resilience very difficult.
This is not because people disagree on the answers. They do, but that is quite natural with such an important question. In fact, people tend to disagree on the questions, let alone the answers. Eventually, a good conversation could alight on a definition of a question and proceed towards a viable answer.
There are three real difficulties. The first is that it is very hard to sell the political benefits of events that do not happen. The nature of resilience is usually that it prevents things from ever taking place. It is a success when we don’t notice it, but something we never notice is no good, politically. The second problem is the sheer scale of investment required. And the third is the time it takes for investment in resilience to pay off. The costs accrue today and the benefits come in the distant future. Again, this does not sound like a wonderful political proposition, and that is why the theme which comes through in all discussions of the subject is the requirement for brave political leadership. The policies are often in place; what they need now is the political will.
Philip Collins
Editor, Prospect
