The UK water sector faces an unprecedented investment programme under AMP8 £104 billion to upgrade and expand infrastructure to meet future needs of the UK. But this isn’t just about spending; it’s about doing so smartly, cost-effectively, and resiliently. Resilience must go beyond asset health and redundancy to embrace system-level risk management.
This challenge is echoed in recent findings from the Cunliffe report, which highlights the critical importance of resilience in water infrastructure and the need for consistent, long-term standards across the industry.
Cunliffe report observations on water sector resilience
“Resilient infrastructure is essential to ensure the ongoing provision of services such as safe drinking water and effective wastewater management. Resilience needs to be assessed through a long-term lens, as well as looking at shorter-term serviceability of assets. Resilience cannot be confined to asset health. It also includes assessing and addressing necessary redundancy and potential critical points of failure in systems”
“There are no consistent, industry-wide standards against which water industry assets and resilience more broadly can be assessed, encompassing not only their condition, but also factors such as redundancy, back up and single points of failure. The NIC has therefore recommended the development and application of national resilience standards”
The Hidden Risks in Today’s Approach
Approaches to system design vary across water companies as local networks have specific requirements. However, there is a growing recognition of the need for greater consistency. Some organisations are already considering concepts like “process safety,” but the sector lacks a unified framework tailored to its unique challenges. Establishing a common approach would help align standards, improve collaboration, and ensure resilience is embedded throughout the supply chain.
This challenge is compounded by the spread of expertise between water companies and the supply chain. Without a shared framework, collaboration between suppliers and operators can become fragmented, making it harder to manage risk effectively. This can lead to failures in system implementation. Especially where sensors, software, or control logic are designed to work in unison. Failures can trigger cascading disruptions, environmental harm, and reputational damage.
Functional Safety principles offer a way forward providing a common language and structured processes that improve clarity, strengthen interfaces, and ensure resilience is built into every stage of design and delivery.
Lessons from Automotive and Oil & Gas
Decades ago, the automotive and oil & gas sectors faced similar challenges. Their solution was Functional Safety, a structured approach to managing risks in electrical, electronic, and programmable systems. Standards like IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 introduced lifecycle processes, hazard analysis, and Safety Integrity Levels (SIL), transforming safety-relevant design. Today, these frameworks underpin technologies we trust from airbags to automated vehicles.
Why Functional Safety for Water? A Common Resilience Framework
As the water industry adopts advanced sensors, SCADA networks, and AI-driven analytics, the parallels with automotive are clear. Both sectors rely on automation for critical decisions. Both face public trust and regulatory scrutiny. Functional Safety provides a common language for risk management—aligning suppliers, contractors, water companies and regulators on design principles, verification methods, and accountability.
Without a common resilience framework, interfaces between suppliers and operators remain vulnerable, leading to unclear responsibilities, inconsistent risk management, and increased likelihood of system failures. By introducing Functional Safety principles, these interfaces gain structure and transparency. Functional Safety establishes a shared language for hazard analysis, risk allocation, and verification, ensuring that every component and interaction is designed with failure prevention in mind. The benefits are significant: fewer costly outages, improved compliance, streamlined collaboration across the supply chain, and confidence that critical infrastructure will perform safely under all conditions.
HORIBA MIRA: Automotive-Grade Safety for Water
HORIBA MIRA has led Functional Safety in automotive for over three decades, shaping ISO 26262 and delivering programmes for global OEMs. Now, we’re applying this expertise to water. Our approach combines:
- Systems Engineering Discipline – holistic design across hardware, software, and human factors.
- Risk-Based Methods – structured hazard analysis and SIL allocation tailored to water.
- Cross-Sector Insight – lessons from automotive, defence, and energy to accelerate resilience.
Together with HORIBA’s leadership in environmental measurement, we offer a unique capability: integrating safety and performance from sensor to system.
“Functional Safety isn’t just about compliance, it’s about building confidence in complex systems. By creating a shared language for risk management across the supply chain, we enable clarity, collaboration, and safer infrastructure. When every component and interface is designed with risk in mind, resilience becomes a measurable outcome, not an aspiration. Far from being an overhead, Functional Safety is an investment in trust, efficiency, and long-term performance.”
Dr. David Ward, Global Head of Resilience, HORIBA MIRA.
Summary
AMP8 is more than an investment programme, it’s a chance to redefine resilience. By adopting Functional Safety as a sector-wide framework, the water industry can:
- Reduce systematic failures and avoid costly downtime.
- Enable innovation without compromising operational assurance.
- Build public trust in an era of digital transformation.
Resilience isn’t about reacting to failure; it’s about designing systems that prevent failure from the start. HORIBA and HORIBA MIRA are ready to help the water sector achieve that standard.