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Risk aversion stifles progress

Peter Meanley is quite right that we need a British Standard to encourage the use of basalt reinforcement (Your View, December 2023). However, in my view we also need a change of attitude in the risk averse procuring authorities, primarily government departments. They often view innovation with suspicion and the process for a departure from standards is convoluted and time consuming.

​The Highways Agency technical memoranda are remarkable and extremely useful design standards but tend to encourage over-conservative designs. Revisions are published from time to time following a rigorous though seemingly very long-winded process, but these are not always adopted by the other National Agencies.

The Welsh Government seems particularly reluctant to adopt revised standards.

In developing standards for a low carbon future, should we not be designing for resilience and in particular adaptability as opposed to the “fail safe” standards currently in use? For instance, should we be designing highway structures for a 120-year life when it is quite feasible that most highways will be redundant in their current form by the year 2144?

Resilience is now considered to be the key factor in flood defence so why not extend the concept to general engineering design?

Peter Jones (M) paj@coedpedr.net

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