In a changing world, the risk of doing nothing is unacceptable

We work with blue chip organisations across industry and the public sector, applying our risk-based approach to a wide range of challenging problems. Our broad client base enables us to keep abreast of the latest analytical methods and bring that experience to bear in other sectors.

  • National Audit Office

    The National Audit Office (NAO) scrutinises public spending for Parliament. Their public audit perspective helps Parliament hold government to account and improve public services.

  • Department for Transport

    DfT works with its agencies and partners to support the transport network that helps the UK’s businesses and gets people and goods travelling around the country. DfT plans and invests in transport infrastructure to keep the UK on the move.

    Drug Driving evaluation

    Our evaluation of the first year of operation of the drug driving legislation introduced in 2015 has been published by the Department for Transport. Combined with improved drug testing technology, the new legislation has helped police forces identify drug drivers and prosecute thousands more drivers who pose a risk to the safety of other road users. Conviction rates for drug driving offences are now similar to those for drink driving.  FOR MORE INFORMATION:

    Longer Semi-Trailer Trial

    GB Longer Semi-trailer Trial (LST): Latest evaluation report and industry insights published by Department for Transport (DfT) as they launch consultation on the future of LSTs.

    For the past 8 years, Risk Solutions, in partnership with @WSP_UK, have been the independent evaluators for the DfT’s GB trial of LSTs.  These vehicles are up to 2m longer than standard UK articulated HGVs and so allow more goods to be transported at once, allowing operators to reduce the number of lorries on the road for the same total quantity of cargo.  This efficiency is further enhanced by a number of operators utilising double deck trailers.

    The trial is designed to evaluate whether, when put into a real-world operation, these trailers:

    • Are operated efficiently, giving real savings in journeys and emissions?
    • Can be operated as safely (or better) than the standard trailers they replace?

    The ongoing LST trial now involves around 2,600 LSTs. Up to the end of 2019 the trial results indicated that:

    • on average, the use of LSTs reduced journey numbers by 1 in 12, with more than 54 million vehicle kilometres saved
    • 48,000 tonnes of CO2(e) and 241 tonnes of NOx have been saved
    • on a per kilometre basis LSTs have been involved in about 53% fewer personal injury collisions and casualties than the GB articulated heavy goods vehicle (HGV) average

    In November 2019, DfT published a series of documents produced by Risk Solutions

    The DfT believes the trial has reached a point where continuing is unlikely to provide further useful results and that remaining issues, relating to the safety, can only be answered outside of trial settings.   So, in parallel with the evaluation reports, the department has launched a public consultation asking if they should end the existing longer semi-trailer (LST) trial, originally due to run until 2027, and move ahead with one of several potential future operational options with differing levels of regulation.

    The consultation documents along with the DfT Impact Assessment of the trial to date are available on the DFT website.  Responses to the consultation is open for submission until 1 February 2021.

    Risk Solutions continues to support the Department in the role of independent evaluation consultants.  Data gathering and analysis will continue until the DfT makes a final decision on the future of LSTs.

    Further information:

    The annual reports from every year of the trial can be found on the Department for Transport’s website at www.gov.uk/government/collections/longer-semi-trailer-trial#progress-reports.

    Trial participants can send any enquiries related to the data collection aspects of the trial to Risk Solutions on 01925 413984 or at LSTTrial@risksol.co.uk

    Any enquiries not related to the data collection or analysis should be addressed directly to:
    Philip Martin
    Head of Freight Policy, Freight, Operator Licensing and Roadworthiness Branch
    freight@dft.gov.uk

  • Highways England

    Highways England operates, maintains and improves England’s motorways and major A roads.  Highways England is responsible to DfT for a rolling five-year 'Road Investment Strategy' programme.  (Roads in the other UK nations are managed by equivalent bodies.)

    Developing a Safety Risk Model

    Risk Solutions has developed a comprehensive Safety Risk Model that analyses the risks to road users, road workers and Traffic Officers associated with the operation, maintenance and improvement of the Strategic Road Network (SRN) in England.  In addition, the model can analyse the safety risk profile on the SRN, identifying the main risks as well as their primary causes. The model is also being used to help Highways England assess the extent to which it can reduce risk by its own actions or by influencing other stakeholders.

    The Safety Risk Model is used to identify the root causes, contributory factors and consequences of collisions involving particular types of vehicles/drivers or on particular road types.  In the course of developing the SRM, and earlier projects analysing road safety risks at particular locations or associated with new methods (such as the introduction of Passively Safe Gantries), we have established an in-depth understanding of a wide range of relevant databases and the skills needed to cleanse and join data, ensuring consistency and accuracy is maintained when data is sourced from the variety of different systems.

    Data has been extracted from a wide range of systems, including:

    • STATS19 – police reports of road traffic collisions involving injuries
    • IRIS – the Traffic Officer’s Incident Reporting System
    • AIRSweb – the supply chain’s Accident and Incident Reporting System
    • HAPMS – the Highways Agency (England) Pavement Management System
    • NTIS – the Highways England National Traffic Information System, and prior to 2015

    HATRIS.

    The SRM uses this data to calculate the statistical safety risk of travelling across the road network, and conducting maintenance and renewal work on the road network.  Safety risk is measured in terms of the number of incidents involving personal injury, the number of killed and seriously injured (KSI), and the number of fatalities and weighted injuries (FWI).  Safety risk is also normalised by the number of vehicle miles or kilometres driven on the Strategic Road Network to allow risk comparisons.

    The SRM and its supporting data can be used to analyse the safety risk profile of the whole strategic road network over time, or individual schemes/roads/routes/areas, identifying the main risks as well as their primary causes. These analytics are used to compare safety risk between different types of road (motorway, dual carriageway, single carriageway), number of carriageway lanes, vehicle type, time of day, location, junction type.

    This means that we are able to offer flexibility in using the model to answer a wide range of questions.  For example enabling risks associated with junctions to be better understood, using HAPMS link-based data to examine how different road characteristics affect risks, such as safety barriers, numbers of lanes, and adding flexibility to select individual road links for a more detailed analysis.

    The results allow Highways England to gain deeper insights about where they should focus time and effort to improve safety for road users and workers, and to evaluate the effectiveness of their investment over time.

    Development of a Network Performance Model

    The network performance model (NPM) was developed for Highways England by Risk Solutions. It is a software model that supports analysis of traffic performance on the strategic road network (SRN). It is used by the HA national intelligence unit (NIU) to support their analysis of network performance.

    The nature of this model is that it can be calibrated to generate and store speed-density curves for road links of the Agency’s network. A stochastic process can then be used to derive expected performance characteristics of these links. The most frequent use of the model is to predict the likely characteristics of a road link’s performance, fed with recorded observed data such as traffic flows and journey times. This is particularly useful for informing the Agency about road performance characteristics that are infeasible to observe directly, such as which parts of the road were in congested flow at any time, given overall measurements of speed and flow.

     Highways England uses this type of analysis to characterise the past performance of its roads, as well as to project scenarios about its expected future performance given various road investment strategies.

  • Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

    Defra IS the UK government department responsible for safeguarding our natural environment, supporting the UK's world-leading food and farming industry, and sustaining a thriving rural economy. Defra's very broad remit means it plays a major role in all our day-to-day lives, from the food we eat and the air we breathe, to the water we drink

    Foot and Mouth

    Following the 2001 outbreak of FMD, Defra imposed a 20-day standstill period prohibiting any livestock movements off-farm following the arrival of an animal. The 20-day rule caused significant difficulties for farmers. The Lessons Learned Inquiry, which reported in July 2002, recommended that the 20-day standstill remain in place pending a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the standstill regime. This was commissioned in September 2002.

    Existing models were not appropriate for the particular types of modelling required, so, due to the short timescales and limited data available, a simplified approach was developed by Risk Solutions to assess the impact of different movement controls. This was an extremely challenging task due to the short timescales and limited data available to inform the model. Our approach was to involve as wide a range of experts as possible ensuring that the different assumptions and simplifications could be fully understood.

    The resultant ‘silent spread’ model indicated that factors other than length of standstill, such as time to detection of disease, are much more important in determining the size of an outbreak. The work was highly influential in the Government’s decision to relax the 20-day movement control to 6 days, subject to certain commitments from the livestock industry. The report can be accessed via the Defra web site.

    Water Abstraction Reform

    About water abstraction 

    Water abstracted from rivers and ground water is used to support many activities from producing mineral water to cooling power stations. Most people who want to abstract more than 20 m3 per day need a licence. Subject to any conditions, an abstraction licence allows a person or organisation to take a certain quantity of water from a particular location and source of supply. It also guarantees that no one else who applies for an abstraction licence can take a share of water that is already allocated. Over 20,000 abstraction licences have been issued in England and Wales. As the population of England and Wales increases and climate change takes hold the demand for water is growing and pressure on our water resources is increasing. Our current water abstraction licensing system will simply not be able to cope in the future.

    The challenge 

    The Water White Paper (Water for Life) sets out a clear case for change. Defra and the Environment Agency worked closely with stakeholders to assess the impacts that different reform options may have. Risk Solutions led a team of experts, including HR Wallingford, AMEC Foster Wheeler and London Economics in a project to assess the impacts that different reform options have on people and organisations that rely on abstracted water. The work considered the different benefits, costs and risks of each option and as far as possible quantified the level and distribution of these impacts.   

    How we did this 

    This was a very complex problem requiring us to understand and model the interactions between hydrological (river and ground water) systems and the behaviours of abstractors in to the future, against a background of changing economic and climatic conditions.  We have produced linked agent based behavioural and hydrological models for ten catchment types based on real catchments in England and Wales.  We used a highly participative approach involving as many abstractors and experts as we could in the process of developing and testing the models.  

    We used the model with Defra, the Environment Agency, the Welsh Government and National Resources Wales to explore how the different catchments responded to the different mechanisms for reform and to inform the design of a hybrid system that could be tailored for application to different types of catchments with different hydrological, ecological and abstraction challenges.   

    Benefits of this work

    Our work was used to inform the Government’s Impact Assessment of the reforms, which presents the evidence for why reform is necessary and the preferred approach.

    Critically the modelling process has also allowed: 

    the proposed policies to be refined by encouraging more systematic consideration of their design, and

    greater understanding of the possible impacts of the reforms to be developed with analysts and stakeholders.

    What reviewers have said

    “an impressive feat of modelling”

    “a well-written report and an ambitious and successful modelling effort”

    “a truly inspiring example of how evidence and analysis can be used to inform policy decisions”

    Chief Economist, NAO

    FOR MORE INFORMATION:

  • Department for Business, Energy…

    BEIS's task is to build an economy that works for everyone in the UK, so that there are great places in every part of the country for people to work and for businesses to invest, innovate and grow.

  • Innovate UK (UKRI)

    Innovate UK is part of UK Research and Innovation, a non-departmental public body funded by grant-in-aid from the UK government. Innovate UK drives productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas, including those from the UK’s world-class research base.

    Travel in Britain in 2035: Future scenarios and their implications for technology innovation

    The transport sector is crucial to the UK economy as a whole, and successful transport technology innovations will benefit not just the transport sector but all areas of life that rely on the movement of people and goods. This study focused on using a scenario approach to explore which transport innovations would give the biggest return in terms of maximising the efficiency of the existing transport infrastructure, and where the UK technology sector could make a difference, by the year 2035.

    RAND and Risk Solutions approached the project in three stages.

    First, we identified the six key technologies that may influence the effectiveness and efficiency of transport:

    • autonomous vehicles
    • next generation ICT connectivity
    • advanced manufacturing (3D printing)
    • user apps / big data and intelligent processing
    • the Internet of Things
    • novel materials and embedded sensors in infrastructure.

    Next we developed three future scenarios to examine the influence of these technologies on travel:

    • Driving Ahead – based on higher-than-forecast economic growth and widespread use of autonomous vehicles
    • Live Local – with moderate growth and use of travel substitution due to advances in communications technology
    • Digital Divide – in which technologies advance but are not evenly distributed because of increased income inequality.

    Finally, we interviewed experts and policy makers about the key policy implications of the scenarios. We then developed a strategic roadmap to inform future UK policies and investments.

    Further information 

    You can download the report from the links below, or contact the report’s lead authors, Charlene Rohr, at crohr@rand.org, and Eleanor Baker, at eleanor.baker@risksol.co.uk, for more information.

    FOR MORE INFORMATION:

  • The Environment Agency

    Environment Agency works to create better places for people and wildlife, and support sustainable development EA is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by Defra.

    Water Abstraction Reform

    About water abstraction 

    Water abstracted from rivers and ground water is used to support many activities from producing mineral water to cooling power stations. Most people who want to abstract more than 20 m3 per day need a licence. Subject to any conditions, an abstraction licence allows a person or organisation to take a certain quantity of water from a particular location and source of supply. It also guarantees that no one else who applies for an abstraction licence can take a share of water that is already allocated. Over 20,000 abstraction licences have been issued in England and Wales. As the population of England and Wales increases and climate change takes hold the demand for water is growing and pressure on our water resources is increasing. Our current water abstraction licensing system will simply not be able to cope in the future.

    The challenge 

    The Water White Paper (Water for Life) sets out a clear case for change. Defra and the Environment Agency worked closely with stakeholders to assess the impacts that different reform options may have. Risk Solutions led a team of experts, including HR Wallingford, AMEC Foster Wheeler and London Economics in a project to assess the impacts that different reform options have on people and organisations that rely on abstracted water. The work considered the different benefits, costs and risks of each option and as far as possible quantified the level and distribution of these impacts.   

    How we did this 

    This was a very complex problem requiring us to understand and model the interactions between hydrological (river and ground water) systems and the behaviours of abstractors in to the future, against a background of changing economic and climatic conditions.  We have produced linked agent based behavioural and hydrological models for ten catchment types based on real catchments in England and Wales.  We used a highly participative approach involving as many abstractors and experts as we could in the process of developing and testing the models.  

    We used the model with Defra, the Environment Agency, the Welsh Government and National Resources Wales to explore how the different catchments responded to the different mechanisms for reform and to inform the design of a hybrid system that could be tailored for application to different types of catchments with different hydrological, ecological and abstraction challenges.   

    Benefits of this work

    Our work was used to inform the Government’s Impact Assessment of the reforms, which presents the evidence for why reform is necessary and the preferred approach.

    Critically the modelling process has also allowed: 

    the proposed policies to be refined by encouraging more systematic consideration of their design, and

    greater understanding of the possible impacts of the reforms to be developed with analysts and stakeholders.

    What reviewers have said

    “an impressive feat of modelling”

    “a well-written report and an ambitious and successful modelling effort”

    “a truly inspiring example of how evidence and analysis can be used to inform policy decisions”

    Chief Economist, NAO

    FOR MORE INFORMATION:

  • Food Standards Agency

    FSA is a non-ministerial Government department working across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to protect public health and consumers' wider interests in food. It make sure that food is safe and what it says it is

  • Animal and Plant Health Agency

    APHA work to safeguard animal and plant health for the benefit of people, the environment and the economy. APHA is an executive agency of DEFRA.

  • Joseph Rowntree Foundation

    The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is an independent social change organisation working to solve UK poverty

  • UK Committee on Climate Change

    CCCS purpose is to advise the UK Government and Devolved Administrations on emissions targets and report to Parliament on progress made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for climate change. CCC is an independent, statutory body established under the Climate Change Act 2008.

  • Local Government Association

    LGA, the national voice of local government, working with councils to support, promote and improve local government.

    Health and social care

    From April 2013, as part of the government’s reforms, responsibility for commissioning many public health services moved from the NHS to local authorities and a new executive agency of the Department of Health, Public Health England.   As local authorities took on their new public health responsibilities. Directors of public health were also given statutory positions on the new health and wellbeing boards – bodies designed to bring together the Health system (NHS and other bodies) and the Public Health system, including all the local provision of social care.

    These changes presented a new challenge to the Local Government Association (LGA), in its role supporting and representing local authorities in all their work.

    In the years following the change, the LGA has designed, piloted and launched a number of interventions to be offered through local authorities, to help them in developing the processes and thinking needed to integrate the efforts of these two systems.  These have include their Integration Workshop, designed for Health and Wellbeing Boards, their Systemwide Care and Health Peer Challenge and most recently, their Prevention at Scale programme.

    Risk Solutions was invited to design a simple and flexible evaluation framework that could provide feedback to the LGA on the efficacy of each of these interventions, not just at the end but during their development, piloting and early implementation – the focus being on constant learning, reflection and adjustment.   In addition to designing and supporting the evaluation process, our lead consultant spent time embedded with the LGA evaluation team during some of the interventions, providing real feedback ‘from the coal face’ and, at some points, in real time.

    “Risk Solutions has an ability to work flexibly and collaboratively but still brings rigour and useful reflections from other work”    Caroline Tapster – Director, Health and Wellbeing System Improvement Programme  LGA

  • National Audit Office

    The National Audit Office (NAO) scrutinises public spending for Parliament. Their public audit perspective helps Parliament hold government to account and improve public services. NAO's recommendations and reports help government improve public services.

    The National Audit Office Value-for-Money

    The National Audit Office (NAO) scrutinises public spending for Parliament, helping Parliament hold government to account and improve public services.

    As well as auditing the financial statements of all central government departments, agencies and other public bodies, the NAO carries our value-for-money (VFM) studies and investigations.  This work  aims at helping government improve public services.

    An important part of its quality assurance arrangements for VFM work, is independent external evaluations of their value for money reports and investigations.  Since 2009 Risk Solutions have been one of the teams that provide this external scrutiny. 

    We review a sample of the reports each year to assess how well they address:

    • The scope and administrative and managerial context
    • Financial, quantitative and qualitative analysis
    • The structure and presentation
    • The use of graphics and statistics
    • Appropriateness and use of methods
    • Synthesis of conclusion and  recommendations (where made)
    • Treatment of systemic issues, and
    • Overall quality as a report to Parliament.

    We meet with NAO periodically to discuss our findings and share experiences. 

    This works helps keep us abreast of the issues public bodies face in providing value-for-money to the public and evaluating their progress.

  • High Speed 2

    High Speed 2 is the new railway that will be the backbone of Britain’s transport network. Learn more about the project and HS2 Ltd, the company building it.

    Value for money decision support tool for HS2

    HS2’s approach to assessing whole life value is aligned to HS2’s strategic goals and anticipated benefits.  They needed a whole life value assessment in conjunction with an existing whole life cost assessment to help determine whether options identified as the programme progresses deliver better value for money across the life of HS2 than the baseline design.

    WSP and Risk Solutions have created a whole life value tool to support this approach. The tool is used to score the value of a decision option in each of the types of benefits anticipated by HS2 Ltd. Users consider all of the potential benefits affected by a design option, scoring each benefit using a range of measures. The tool presents a dashboard view showing the final value of the option being considered against the HS2 benefit baseline.

    The whole life value tool is designed to work in parallel with HS2’s whole life cost tool, so that value for money can be compared for each design option.

    HS2 Ltd can update the tool to reflect changes in direction over time: e.g. changing the types of benefits of interest, the measures used to score each type of benefit, and the alignment of benefits with HS2 strategic goals.

    HS2 Ltd and their contractors are now using the tool to measure and compare the value of various options, providing assurance that each design decision is made with a complete understanding of how the outcomes will affect the anticipated benefits of the HS2 programme.

  • Rail Safety and Standards Board Ltd

    All the major stakeholders in the GB railways are members of RSSB. Through research, standards and analysis RSSB helps its members deliver a better, safer railway.

    Research award to understand knock-on delay in rail services

    Background

    UK passenger journeys have doubled over the last 20 years and the high growth trend is expected to continue. With critical parts of the network running close to capacity during peak times, small delays can easily propagate and be difficult to recover. With service reliability resulting in 16.7m delay minutes in 2018/19 there is pressure on the industry to achieve performance improvements to run more trains on time today, while improving the rail performance of tomorrow. 

    This project explored the feasibility of using data-driven modelling to simulate train services and identify the root causes and consequences of reactionary delay, which accounts for around 70 percent of delay minutes.

    Method

    Risk Solutions worked with a team from City University of London, who specialise in creating interactive visualisations of complex data, and Great Western Railway train operating company (GWR), to create two prototype tools: 

    • an agent-based model to simulate train services, and 
    • a set of interactive visualisations to explore the complex interactions between modelled train services.

    The agent-based model runs on a Windows laptop/desktop and characterises train services as individual agents that move along routes defined by a timetable and follow predefined rules. These rules determine when and how trains can travel between locations, and when they stop or pass at locations. They also create conflicts that result in reactionary delays. Delays due to incidents associated with trains and locations are applied at random, are characterised to represent typical UK rail operations, and can be changed to represent alternative scenarios. 

    The model uses this information to simulate hundreds of days of rail services and produce to-the-second delay data for individual train services and station stopping points. It is data driven, so is able to model different types of delays, scenarios, and routes, by changing the input data.

    The interactive visualisation tools were written in Java, which can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

    The agent-based model was used to simulate train services on the Great Western Railway route from London Paddington to Bristol. The model, combined with visualisation techniques, successfully identified the root causes of reactionary delay and predicted the effectiveness of interventions that could be taken to improve performance. 

    Impact and benefits to the rail industry

    The project showed that insight into the underlying causes of reactionary delay can be used to make more informed interventions that help to improve service performance. The tools that were developed can also be used to:

    • quantify the impact of interventions and provide evidence to support Joint Performance Improvement Plans
    • test operational contingency plans 
    • test intervention options without expensive and time-consuming trials
    • increase confidence in the resilience and reliability of solutions to reduce delays
    • test a new timetable or changes to an existing timetable (e.g. the impact of adding or removing train services)

    With further development the tools could also be used to:

    • quantify the impact of speed restrictions and extended possessions
    • calculate the financial benefits of reducing delays
    • test the impact of reducing station dwell times
    • model the impacts of passenger journey demand
    • test alternative network infrastructure or train assets

    “A tool for modelling reactionary delay has the potential to function as a tool for estimating the performance impact of a new timetable, and this has been of particular interest to Great Western Railway, given the introduction of a new timetable later this year. The model developed by the project team is able to compare the performance impact of different timetables via user-configurable inputs and parameters”.

    Simon Greenwood, Performance Analysis Manager, Great Western Railway

    FOR MORE INFORMATION:

  • New Economic Knowledge Services

    NEKS has been established to help policy makers, regulators, business and finance navigate these challenging times by drawing on new thinking and techniques in economics and other disciplines that take seriously the complex and uncertain nature of these systems, and the importance of understanding real human behaviour and institutions.

    Agent Based Modelling: what is the big deal about policy?

    This was an event run by NEKS, allowing you to better understand how ABMs are best used to inform policy and regulatory strategies. It is given by people who have both built and used ABMs. Jonathan Hyde from Risk Solutions presents at the event, describing how our agent based models solve real world complex problems.

    Agent Based Modelling (ABM) is a key new technique for exploring complex economic problems. It can represent complex interactions between agents over time under different scenarios. It can be used to better understand and mitigate risks and identify and accentuate opportunities for policy. It is a key tool recommended by people such as Andy Haldane, Chief Economist of the Bank of England and Richard Bookstaber, former Securities and Exchange Commission regulator and Treasury department adviser. Current users include government depts and agencies, banks, major retailers and the military amongst others.