RICS has been announced as a member of a £16 million consortium designed to drive innovation across major infrastructure projects in the UK.

RICS are a delivery partner for the ‘Transport Infrastructure Efficiency Strategy Living Lab’ (TIES Living Lab) project which is collaboration aimed at harnessing the vast quantities of intelligence that UK infrastructure projects generate, to help identify modern methods of construction and procurement that will drive down delivery times, reduce carbon footprint and improve safety and skills for construction workers.

Over the next two years the partnership will invest more than £16 million in new tools, processes and data systems - bringing together infrastructure and industry leaders with business and academic institutions to build on, and establish, best practice in the way we design, build and integrate innovations within transport assets.

RICS involvement is funded by innovate UK and we will input into the establishing of project benchmarks for capital and whole life costs, carbon and social value and help embed the findings in Government procurement practice and disseminate them to the industry at large.

The project will be delivered by a collaboration of BCIS, RICS publishing, events and communications teams.
This is an opportunity for RICS to promote its role in infrastructure and embed the use of ICMS data structure in the benchmarks in the transport sector.

Launching the project Minister of State Andrew Stephenson said: “The Living Lab is a great opportunity for industry and academics to work together to embrace new, more productive, more efficient and more sustainable ways of delivering transport infrastructure.”

Further details of TIES is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/transport-infrastructure-efficiency-strategy

Further details of the Living Labs project are available for the National Skills Academy for Rail (NSAR) https://www.nsar.co.uk/2020/07/the-ties-living-lab-programme/