Hosting a fifth conversation in Prospect’s Resilience Series of roundtables, clear themes are emerging. For example, nations that fail to address resiliency in one arena are likely to see detrimental impacts elsewhere. These cascading failures are common but not always foreseen.
It is evident, too, that while the infrastructure under scrutiny—this time our interconnected transport systems—may differ, the underlying questions remain the same. Is the sector prepared for whatever may be coming next? And if it’s not ready, or only partially so, what needs to change? To consider both questions and to understand the specific needs of transport, Prospect—and its partner for this event, Amey—convened policymakers, industry leaders and experts.
The discussion began with an acknowledgement that definitions of resilience vary. For some it is about long-term infrastructure durability; for others it’s about response to sudden system shocks. Either way, the pressures that exist across our roads and rail, our sea ports and airports, are real. These include ageing assets, climate exposure, constrained funding, increasing usage and a more complex risk environment.
As the opening speaker noted: “None of this is new, but what is new is the level of interdependence that now exists between our systems, as well as the speed at which failure can now cascade. Power disruption to the rail network can lead to road congestion. It can lead to people not getting to work. It can lead to economic impacts.”
The government’s 10-year infrastructure strategy, launched in June 2025, was broadly welcomed by attendees, described as a “positive step” in providing “greater visibility towards a longer-term horizon, and a clearer sense of national intent”. However, the real test remains. Namely, whether that intent “translates into decisions and makes us do something different about infrastructure.” Deeds, not just words, are required.
Picking up on the dangers of cascading failure, attendees pinpointed a continuing lack of integration not just within the transport sector but in the wider economy. “We’re good at understanding individual assets,” said another attendee, but until individual parts of the industrial ecosystem work more closely together, the response to future shocks will remain reactive. “It’s very easy to focus in on a particular sector, but it doesn’t help us resolve the problem. It doesn’t give us consistency.” The Netherlands was cited as an exemplar in this respect, a country that not only brings together different transport networks but interweaves housing, health and other policy areas. “There are ministers sitting on joint groups deciding where funding goes.”
Part of the problem, suggested some, is a disparity between long- and short-term thinking. It’s difficult, for example, to predict long-term performance when managing a generally ageing asset base. Yet forecasting is essential for investors and policymakers alike. Here investment risk and the long-term sustainability of a project interlock. For the policymaker, meanwhile, the focus tends towards the near term. “From the politician’s point of view, if there’s no reward within the latest election cycle, well it doesn’t exist.”
For those investing in UK transport infrastructure, certainty is a common ask. One voice willing to offer an alternative point of view suggested that the habitually futile search for certainty seems to be an obsession “unique to infrastructure”. Elsewhere, people are willing to invest “walls of capital” into competitive and uncertain markets.
Responding to this critique, another attendee put this tendency towards caution down to “risk allocation”. Infrastructure is treated as an alternative asset by pension funds, insurance companies and others. All seek “long-term defensive cash flows.”
Elsewhere, the effects of climate change are among the most visible causes of present and future disruption to transport networks. Consider, for example, that 596 railway stations and 3,544km of rail network are at risk from surface water flooding across the UK. Adaptation is expensive and here perceptions of value for money among transport users butt up against the cost of sustainable infrastructure. One attendee called for an honest “conversation about what the right level of investment is and what people are willing to pay for… There might be bits of the network that we have to accept are too expensive to adapt in order to maintain current service levels.”
Key parts of the road and rail network—the latter cast as a “Victorian asset”—are coming up for renewal and there’s pressure to get those fixes right first time, especially in the context of a changing climate. “You don’t want to go back in 30 years to fix a bridge that was designed to last 80 because it hasn’t allowed for the kind of flood levels that we’re expecting to see in a 2°C world by 2050 and a 4°C world by 2100.”
Climate change presents a resilience paradox, too. On the one hand, the move to clean power will help hedge “against volatile fossil fuel markets”. On the other hand, a move to electrification will make new demands on transport networks. One estimate suggests around 80 per cent of the road fleet will be electrified by 2040 and that the charging system will become “more disaggregated, less centralised”. Ultimately, decentralisation may aid durability but there is no guarantee.
Resilience isn’t a single intervention. It’s a discipline that should be embedded into the transport lifecycle
If long- and short-term planning presents one dichotomy for the transport industry to wrestle with, another is whether to build new or to renew. At least one attendee has detected a change in language. There is now talk of “prioritising maintenance and renewals”. He noted how the government’s last road investment strategy pivoted away from new build and is waiting to see if rail will follow. For this to work requires a correction of existing market failures, he argued. “The only way you do this is through changing the regulatory incentives, changing the policy incentive so [renewal] is properly valued.”
The roundtable ended with a call for potential solutions and areas of urgent focus. Among them, attendees pointed to the need to preserve a skilled workforce, greater emphasis on behavioural change to address demand-side pressures and the necessity to come up with local answers to wider resilience challenges—remedies that demonstrate tangible benefits for specific communities.
Others led a call for continued innovation as a means of mitigating future crises. Some looked to Ukraine for inspiration, with one attendee noting, by way of example, how the under-siege nation has created plug-in micro grids to counter hostile attacks, providing a means of keeping “the lights on and keeping the kids from getting scared”. Innovation closer to home requires similarly “unshackled” thinking, said one policy-focused attendee. It requires “really smart people coming up with ‘sci fi-like’ ideas. We ask them, ‘What’s in your wildest imagination?’”
More than one attendee called for resilience to be “baked into” infrastructure projects from the start. “Too often resilience is… something we layer on after we design, fund and operate,” said one attendee. “Resilience isn’t a single intervention. It’s a discipline that should be embedded in the transport lifecycle, not treated as an afterthought.”
Transport Resilience, part of Prospect’s Resilience Series and jointly hosted by Amey, took place on Thursday 30th April 2026
