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Chair of the Live Labs Commissioning Board, Neil Gibson, introduces Live Labs 2 and the seven winning projects working across four exciting new collaborations.

Live Labs 2 is now officially underway! Funded by the Department for Transport (DfT), the £30 million ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads follows the hugely successful Live Labs 1. The latest set of projects is a three-year, UK-wide programme focused on tackling the long-term decarbonisation of highways infrastructure and assets across local roads.

It was an incredibly competitive process and the winning teams all put forward programmes that will create centres of excellence or bring new models and innovation to local highways asset maintenance and construction. They clearly demonstrated that they not only had the ideas, but also the motivation and drive to try things that haven’t been done so far. This is fundamental to the Live Labs ethos and it means that not everything will work – it’s part of the learning process to reinvent and find different ways of doing things.

Live Labs 2: one of the biggest research and development (R&D) programmes funded by DfT

Live Labs 2 is one of the biggest research and development (R&D) programmes being funded by DfT at the moment, demonstrating a significant commitment to invest in R&D linked to carbon and supporting highways. The UK spend on local highways assets is a £multi-billion annual expenditure but we don’t know the carbon impact. In simple terms, our remit is to understand the problem and find out how to fix it through the Live Labs projects. An important part of this will be to look at how we scale the learning up and make it ‘ business as usual’ in the sector. While there is some ambition, we don’t have enough at the moment and it is fragmented. That said, it is achieving the best that it can as it stands, but we are aspiring to so much more through the Live Labs 2 programme.

So why are we different? It is a combination of the ambition of the Live Labs 2 cohort and the Commissioning Board, a hand-picked team of people from across the sector who will have a key role to play over the next three years in working with the project teams as they develop products and outputs. We also have a significant monitoring and evaluation programme wrapped around this, which will run for at least five years beyond the end of Live Labs 2. And we are allowed to fail! Together this is a really interesting set of ingredients that makes us subtly different in how we will make a difference in the sector.

As with Live Labs 1, we will bring you regular updates on progress, innovations and learnings through this blog. In the meantime, let me introduce you to the Live Labs 2 themes and projects…

Four interconnected themes

Live Labs 2 is based around four interconnected themes that recognise project synergies and enable close collaboration between the teams. The themes are:

• A UK centre of excellence for materials – providing a centralised hub for research and innovation for the decarbonisation of local roads materials, developing a knowledge bank, real-life conditions testing and sharing and learning insights: North Lanarkshire Council & Transport for West Midlands.
• Corridor and place-based decarbonisation – a suite of corridor and place-based decarbonisation interventions covering urban through to rural applications, trailing, testing and showcasing applications within the circular economy and localism agendas: Wessex partnership (Somerset County Council, Cornwall Council and Hampshire County Council), Devon County Council, and Liverpool City Council.
• A green carbon laboratory – examining the role that the non-operational highways ‘green’ asset can play in providing a source of materials and fuels to decarbonise highway operations: South Gloucestershire Council & West Sussex County Council.
• A future lighting testbed – a systems-based examination of the future of lighting for local roads to determine what assets are needed for our future networks and how they can be further decarbonised across their lifecycle: East Riding of Yorkshire Council.

Live Labs 2 projects

The Live Labs are:

• Devon County Council: A382 (Including Jetty Marsh Link Road) – Carbon Negative Project.
• East Riding of Yorkshire Council (in partnership with the Department for Infrastructure, Northern Ireland; Cambridgeshire County Council; Derbyshire County Council; Hull City Council; Lancashire County Council; Oxfordshire County Council; Westminster City Council and York City Council): High Visual Efficiency for low carbon lighting - decarbonising street lighting.
• Liverpool City Council (in partnership with Aberdeen City Council, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and Newcastle City Council): Liverpool ‘Ecosystem of Things’ driving a low-carbon economy.
• North Lanarkshire Council: UK Centre of Excellence for Material Decarbonisation in Local Roads
• South Gloucestershire Council and West Sussex County Council: Greenprint – a net carbon-negative systems model for green infrastructure management.
• Transport for West Midlands: Highways CO2llaboration Centre for materials decarbonisation.
• Wessex partnership (Somerset County Council, Cornwall Council and Hampshire County Council): Wessex Live Labs – Net Zero Corridors.

Further information

• For more information on ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads in the UK, please look at the Live Labs 2 section on the website

Author

Neil Gibson is Chair of the Live Labs Commissioning Board