Digging Up Britain

The last few years have been brilliant for our joint venture partner LinesearchbeforeUdig (LSBUD), a free to use online safe digging service which provides the location of underground assets and infrastructure across the UK. LSBUD exists to reduce the risk of death, injury, damage, and disruption caused by asset strikes. The safety of the public and those working near utility cables, pipes and other essential equipment is of the highest priority. Any individual or organisation can use the LSBUD portal to check their work against more than 100 asset owners’ utility networks which include over one million kilometres of underground and overhead pipes and cables.

Evidence proves that there is a search being done every six seconds with more than 3.4 million enquiries each year. LSBUD’s goal is clear, they want to encourage all UK asset owners to make their information available through this collaborative service to keep assets and workers and the community safe in the process. The safe digging community continues to be stronger and there are now more than 100 members registered on the portal which has led to a safer environment for everyone. The majority of digging work has been performed by the telecoms sector who

Apr21 – Mar 22

• 3.47 million enquiries processed

• 40,017 new registrations

• 8 new members (SP Energy Networks, Squire Energy, SAS Associates, Palm Paper, DS Smith, NTT Global Data, EU Networks, Last Mile), with preparatory work with many more.

• Two of our major Members, Cadent and National Grid, made improvements which meant an addition of all of their network assets onto the service. Altogether, we were able to add over 200,000km of pipes and cables- reflecting approximately 20% growth need detailed underground mapping with over 1.2 million searched in 2021. The water industry submitted over 900,000 enquiries, a 11% increase from 2020. Together these two sectors account for 77% of all digging work. The consistent growth in number of search enquiries confirms the digging industry’s willingness to improve as well as the public understanding of the benefits of searching before digging even before starting a relatively small home improvement project. 2021 saw a 25% increase in the number of searches with 157,428 being carried out.

• We also finalised terms with John Bennett, who joined us as Head of New Ventures towards the end of 2021 to expand our offering to the market and work on some exciting new offerings.