What's in the UK government's plan to make transport disruption-proof?

The transport system underpins people’s daily lives and the running of the economy. It’s a complex, diverse system that’s highly vulnerable to disruption.

Last year’s Heathrow substation fire showed the costs of not embedding resilience in planning.

In 2026, extreme heatwaves, flooding and storms have all had major impacts on transport infrastructure and services.

A timely new strategy has set out the Department for Transport’s (DfT) plan to improve the network’s resilience over the next decade.

Resilience in the round

The Transport Resilience Strategy complements DfT’s Climate Adaptation Strategy for Transport – but looks beyond climate risks to address resilience as a whole.

It builds on last year’s Resilience Action Plan, which looked at how the UK can withstand and recover from a wide range of shocks.

Infrastructure is considered but the plan doesn’t announce new projects – instead highlighting the commitments made in the 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy.

Rather, it emphasises people and capability and the actions needed to ensure preparedness. These fall under three main objectives:

1. Continuously assessing how resilient the UK transport sector is to target interventions and resources effectively.
2. Enabling the whole of the transport system, including users, to take action to increase their resilience.
3. Strengthening government’s transport resilience capabilities.

Assessing risks and resilience

A more comprehensive and shared understanding of the risks facing the sector is needed to enable an effective response.

The DfT will develop better tools like standardised risk assessments and registers.

The plan also commits to developing and monitoring resilience standards for the sector to set expectations.

There’s also a focus on learning lessons, for example by running more exercises to test the effectiveness of response plans.

Managing interdependencies

It’s welcome that the strategy highlights risks from interdependencies – both between different parts of the transport network and with other sectors.

For example, transport will be increasingly reliant on the resilience of energy infrastructure as electrification of rail and road transport increases through the net zero transition.

The ICE has long called for planning that better addresses the inter-related nature of infrastructure systems.

Our report on the value of climate resilience highlighted the need for more data to understand cross-system vulnerabilities and the likely impacts of cascading failures.

The DfT promises to provide more guidance on upstream risks and better align transport and energy resilience planning.

Promoting resilient infrastructure

While infrastructure isn’t the focus of the plan, it does recognise its fundamental importance to a resilient transport network.

The plan highlights three key factors needed to improve system-wide readiness, manage costs and reduce disruption:

• Designing resilience into projects from the outset – which is critical given the scale of new investment outlined in the 10-year infrastructure plan.
• Targeted maintenance of existing infrastructure – which is too often overlooked.
• Making better use of digital twins in risk assessment and targeting interventions.

The DfT will also strengthen Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) resilience by improving mapping to understand and respond to vulnerabilities and formalising its engagement with operators.

Enabling action at all levels

Reducing siloes, building networks and raising capability are key themes underpinning the plan.

A new Transport Resilience Network will build on existing regional forums to bring together practitioners and experts from across the system, other sectors and academia.

It will act as a critical friend network to test, challenge and advise on preparedness.

And a new Transport Resilience Academy will train and develop all those with relevant roles.

People-centred resilience

The plan extends to the role of users in building a resilient network.

In April, the government’s long-awaited integrated transport strategy set out a people-centred vision that focused on better connectivity, information and reliability.

The new plan builds on that promise by making improving the experience of transport users a primary goal of better transport resilience.

It aims to ensure users are better prepared and take a more “humanitarian” approach to resilience.

This will include assessing the need for transport specific guidance and training to improve support for vulnerable users.

This is important given recent ICE polling looking at inclusivity and people’s experience of infrastructure.

The poll suggested that women, people with disabilities, those living in non-urban areas, older people and those with a lower household income were more likely to feel unsafe, unconfident or not included when using transport infrastructure.

Building government capability

The Climate Change Committee and others have emphasised the importance of strong leadership and governance arrangements in effective resilience planning.

The DfT manages transport risks at a national level and commits to better embedding those responsibilities in decision-making.

This will mean identifying accountable leaders and ensuring their teams understand and can fulfil their roles, and running more training to strengthen internal crisis capability.

A new Appraisal, Modelling and Evaluation Strategy will help capture resilience impacts in decisions about future transport projects and investment.

Resilience responsibilities will also be formally embedded in arm’s length bodies, like Great British Railways, through their governance frameworks.