Thames upgrades £45m mains pipe

Thames Water has upgraded a 13.7km mains pipe in Swindon as part of a £45 million project to boost water resilience in the western end of its supply region.

The company is in the final stage of the three-year undertaking to build resilience and significantly reduce leaks in an area with a history of bursts.

The pipeline, which runs between Faringdon and Blunsdon, is due to come online this spring after work began in May 2021.

“The pipeline will also benefit the local environment, reducing reliance on groundwater sources that draw from chalk streams and the River Kennet during high demand and drought conditions,” said Chris Reeves, head of programme delivery at Thames.

The company worked with Kier contractors over the duration. Andy Muncer, project director at Kier, said: “It’s a complex piece of work and we’ve taken an innovative approach to ensure it’s being delivered efficiently to a high-quality, and in a way which protects the local environment.

Teams had to work around ongoing archaeological investigations in the area after artefacts from the remains of Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon sites had been discovered prior to work beginning.

Leakage is an ongoing challenge for the company and central theme in its three-year turnaround plan. Thames admitted it will not meet its leakage reduction target for 2023/24 and forecast 35 megalitres (Ml) more will be lost each day than expected.

The company is overhauling processes to find and repair where water is being lost is one of the central tenets of its turnaround plan as an area that customers expect improvements to be made.

Thames said previous failings were due to oversight and governance of improvements to leakage being too fragmented and complex, with inefficient approaches taken to pilot schemes.

The company invested £1.8 billion during 2022/23 across its region out of the total £9.3 billion investment for the current asset management period (AMP7). Going into AMP8, it proposed to spend a record £18.7 billion over 2025-30.