Improving infrastructure benefits for deprived communities through public data insights

Peter Radford

Peter has 40 years of civil engineering experience in an approximately equal split of public sector and private consulting employment. After extensive work for London Underground (with Travers Morgan) in the 1980s, Peter was invited to write their new Tunnels, Bridges and Structures Inspection manual. This 300-page tome was finished while Peter was still in his 20s and helped him develop a passion for railway history and infrastructure. Extensive other work in London also included inspection, load assessment and investigation of a number of Thames bridges. Other clients included British Rail, Dept of Transport and numerous councils.

Peter moved to the South West in 1992 to take the reins of the Bridge Assessment Programme for Somerset County Council, then becoming variously Somerset’s Transport Infrastructure Manager then Bridges, Highway Assets and Service Improvement Manager. Peter also led various national service improvement groups including the National Highways Benchmarking Club and the National Highways and Transport Network (NHT). Peter initiated the ICE Taunton City Club in 2007 and also chaired ICE South West for its 2011-12 session. Peter’s work, including on numerous major projects and programmes, often found him having to work collaboratively to resolve matters with numerous stakeholders with forthright and opposing views! Peter has, throughout his career, engaged extensively with British Rail, British Rail Property Board, Railtrack and, more lately, Network Rail.

Among the accolades for Peter’s Somerset projects were two ICE South West Project of the Year Awards, three National Green Apple environmental awards, a National Historic Bridge/Infrastructure Award and the internationally contested ‘Fleming Award’ for geotechnical excellence. Immediately after local government Peter did a three-year stint in contracting with Crestmoor.

In the last six years, with Turner and Townsend, Peter has worked on the motorway/road implications of the Heathrow expansion, helped resolve extensive motorway programme clashes in Kent and led a variety of National Highways assignments in the South West, as well as working on numerous MOD projects.

Mark Painter

Mark is a seasoned data professional with extensive experience in the public sector. He spent 27 years at Devon County Council, where he led an analytics team, before joining Turner and Townsend. Mark excels at transforming large, disparate datasets into actionable insights and presenting them in engaging ways.

A passionate advocate for the storytelling power of maps, Mark supported GIS users across the council, designing and delivering training to maximise the tools’ potential and maintaining key geographic datasets. His enthusiasm for maps and his skill in using data visualisations to describe places led him to collaborate with Peter Radford on Turner and Townsend’s IBIS initiative. This tool identifies areas of inequality to help target interventions more effectively.

In his spare time, Mark enjoys programming and creating projects with VBA, Python, R, and JavaScript.