Road disruption imposes significant costs to the London economy and wider society, with streetworks being a major contributory factor. These costs include journey time disruptions, disruption to local residents, business losses, and increased carbon and air quality emissions.
Collaborative streetworks schemes are where multiple utility streetworks in the same location are planned and implemented under joint occupation, resulting in reduced costs to society. Since 2019, the Greater London Authority (GLA) Infrastructure Coordination Service(ICS) has been working with highways authorities, utilities, and other stakeholders to deliver a portfolio of such collaborations.
Simetrica-Jacobs with Jacobs were commissioned by the GLA (funded through the BEIS Regulators’ Pioneer Fund) to help support this ambition. This centred around developing an approach to measuring the social value associated with reduced days of disruption resulting from collaborative working. The study also involved a review of incentive approaches to encourage a collaborative way of working across multiple regulated sectors. As part of this project, Simetrica-Jacobs delivered a Benefit Assessment Strategy and a Monitoring and Evaluation Tool(M+E).
The Benefits Assessment Strategy provided a systematic approach for measuring and valuing the benefits of collaborative streetworks schemes and key principles for how social value can be embedded across the programme cycle, consistent with HM Treasury Green Book.
Building on this strategy,a functional Monitoring and Evaluation Tool was developed that can be applied to all collaborations and will allow the GLA and London’s utilities to easily, and consistently, quantify the benefits of each scheme. The core benefits captured in the tool included: wellbeing impacts; journey time savings; business losses avoided; environmental impacts of carbon emissions and air pollution; and cost efficiencies resulting from collaboration. Since its creation, the tool has been successfully applied to the portfolio, providing evidence of the social value and value for money of collaborative streetworks schemes, and is effectively supporting the scale-up of the ‘dig-once’ approach.
