UKSTT Lifetime Achievement Award 2026
Q. What was your background/experience and what first brought you into the trenchless industry?
Even as a child I had a fascination with digging holes and understanding how structures and machines worked. So I was naturally drawn into civil engineering.
In my teens at the start of the 1970’s, during holidays, I worked as a junior site engineer for A. Streeter and Co installing sewers around Woking and Chertsey. I learnt a lot about the difficulties of deep trenches in bad ground and how these challenges could be managed.
After graduating from Imperial College, I very nearly started my career constructing what would eventually become the Jubilee line on the London Underground but personal circumstances led me to take a job nearer home in Local Government in Woking. Both there and in my next job at Bracknell I was primarily working on sewerage design and supervision, including some small tunnels. Manual techniques of pipejacking and headings were still state of the art at that time.
I joined Thames Water in 1985 as a sewerage liaison engineer managing 11 local authorities. At that time local authorities engineering departments acted as agents for Water and Sewerage Authorities in delivery of the sewerage function. Around 1987/8 in anticipation of privatization, Thames Water underwent a major restructure associated with a determination to break away from what was perceived as a risk averse local authority culture. Instead, it chose to embrace and encourage emerging or novel construction and rehabilitation techniques that could eventually be more financially efficient. I was given a new role as Systems Engineer to ensure that the 93 local authorities, in Thames Water’s area, adopted this philosophy and that they could feel confident that Thames Water would manage the technical/financial risks of trying new ideas. It was an exciting stage in the development of many trenchless technologies, particularly microtunnelling and directional drilling. Sewer renovation techniques also experienced a spike in development at that time, probably driven by an expectation of greater investment in sewerage infrastructure. Part of my role was to encourage and set up site trials of new things in situations of minimum risk. So in this period of my career, I became very active in the field of trenchless technology and got to know all the key players.
I realised early on that we needed to learn from both successes and failures and that the best way to manage that was through careful specification and standards. This role also led me into standards writing more generally (Water Industry Standards, British Standards and European Standards). I still chair the BSi committee on Sewer Renovation.
For a short time, Thames Water marketed the expertise we gained through an international arm. This led to me working for periods in India and Dubai introducing trenchless technologies there. It was clear there were massive opportunities for microtunnelling in particular in Dubai and for appropriate sewer renovation technologies in India.
Q. What does the Award mean to you personally (and/or to your family)?
For me it is a great honour to receive recognition from my peers for the many small nudges that I made that helped the trenchless industries achieve their maximum potential.
Q. What advice do you have for people considering a career in the Trenchless Industry?
I would recommend that they constructively challenge established wisdom on what is possible and why
things work or don’t. This way arbitrary boundaries can be moved through better understanding. Any justified existing limitations can be retained but seen as opportunities for new ideas to develop.
For example, the established wisdom in the 1980s was that the curing, of cured in place sewer linings, occurred in such a way that as parts cured and shrank slightly, the curing shrinkage of the resin would be accommodated by movement in the parts that had not yet set. Therefore, there was no need to be concerned about annular gaps as they would be so small. By 2002 after a lot of lining work had been done to solve problems from the high groundwater event of 2001, we knew this was not the case and annular leakage – particularly in the case of polyester resin/polyester fibre – was a serious issue.
Q. Who has mentored you over the course of your career?
I have learned important things from a huge number of people through my career, so it is very difficult to single people out. However, particularly in areas of research, design and standards there are two people I would regard as my go-to mentors for discussion and sage advice. Nick Orman at WRc and Dr John Gumbel. They have helped me on so many occasions through constructive discussion.
Q. What do you consider to be your biggest accomplishments?
I will probably be most remembered for the development of a leak-tightness test for linings to prevent infiltration into sewers. This has recently been updated and published as Water Industry Specification WIS 4-34-07 Issue 1 Specification for leak tightness testing of cured-in-place-pipe lining systems for gravity sewer rehabilitation.
I developed the original test in the early 2000’s building on earlier work by my colleague Mike Chesterman at Thames Water and engineers at Subterra. It was clear to us that many lining systems did not perform as well as their publicity indicated and we needed an objective test to quantify performance.
Aside from that I am proud of the work I have done towards the development of many Water Industry Standards, British Standards and European Standards. These are a legacy from all of us that were involved and they contribute greatly to the credibility of our industries by setting out how to consistently achieve predictable performance and reliability.
Lastly, I think the work I did with Mike Shepherd and various colleagues in R&T at Thames Water on analysing sewer rising main failure modes was significant step. By physically examining hundreds of pipe failures over 20 years, we formed a sound understanding of a number of previously not understood aspects of pipe deterioration and were able to refine some known modes. This information enabled us to form a strong base for predicting future failures and the sections of pipe at greatest risk. WRc have documented much of the findings in subsequent reports and I have recorded a training module with JBP. Some members may recall an overview presentation I gave on the topic at NoDig in 2022. The ability to plan pipe renovation/replacement activity rather than just be forced to act reactively, creates greater opportunities to develop trenchless solutions.
Q. What has been your most challenging trenchless experience over the years?
Rather than selecting the most challenging project, I think my biggest challenge has been impatience/frustration.
· Impatience/frustration at the way the UK water industry has progressively become dominated by short term economic thinking. This has greatly damaged the reputation of the sector by making it harder for those of us who wished to do the right thing. Safeguards on quality, reliability, durability and safety are too often regarded as “gold plating”. Poor QA often leads to avoidable premature failure. Shareholders, regulators and politicians have all contributed to this situation.
· Impatience/frustration with the time it takes to produce European Standards or get them updated. This leads to people and organizations losing interest and abandoning the necessary committees.
Sadly, these are challenges that I cannot solve. Fixing sewers is easy by comparison!
Q. What do you currently see as the UK’s and the industry’s most urgent challenges and where do you hope to see the trenchless industry in the next 10 to 20 years?
Strategically, we still have a huge amount of asset renovation or renewal to address but our current regulatory models lead to wide fluctuations in investment year by year. This needs to be smoothed out by a better regulatory model that will facilitate expert staff retention in both the utilities and the contractor sectors. I think there is increased political awareness that the way the water and sewerage industry is regulated is not delivering what the electorate wants. However, that will always have to be balanced by what the electorate are prepared to pay so don’t anticipate too much of a boost. I hope a better path will be found but it won’t be quick.
Technologically I think we will see improvements in understanding the sub-surface environment. I anticipate further developments in non destructive ground probing techniques, (local and satellite based) and thermal imaging, along with shared utility records – perhaps including uploaded photographs of every excavation, better targeted CCTV and other physical surveying – and all interpreted by artificial intelligence for at least the primary screening step. If we have better knowledge of what is where and what condition it is in, we can plan better and that increases the opportunity to implement trenchless solutions.
So, I am hopeful that our trenchless industries have a promising future.