The UK water sector is not short of money. It is short of the people, skills and delivery models needed to spend it fast enough. That was the central message of Exclusive Preview: New Industry Research on the Future of Water Infrastructure Delivery, a webinar held on 26 August 2026 by RSE and Smart Water Magazine. Stephen Slessor, Chief Executive Officer of RSE, and Kes Juskowiak, Managing Director at RSE, used the session to give an exclusive preview of survey findings from RSE’s forthcoming report, Modular by Design: Closing the Delivery Gap, ahead of its publication.
The research, designed and run independently by the Diffley Partnership, was fielded across the UK water and infrastructure supply chain between May and July 2026. More than 125 people responded, and 85 completed the survey in full, just under half of them from water companies and the rest from the wider water ecosystem.
Funding is not the problem
Slessor opened by putting the scale of investment on the table: £104 billion in AMP8 across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, plus a further £3.5 billion added through reopeners agreed with Ofwat, pushing total investment toward £120 billion over the next five to six years. “The money is there, and the ambition is there,” he said. “What the research asked is whether the capacity is there to convert it.”
The survey results back that framing. Among water companies, 56% named managing costs as one of their two biggest delivery pressures, and 46% pointed to the sheer speed of programme delivery. Among the wider supply chain of contractors, consultants and technology providers, 54% put workforce and skills availability at the top of the list, and 72% said they were under significant or moderate pressure to upgrade or replace treatment assets right now, not in a future investment period. Slessor summed it up straightforwardly: “It’s not a funding problem anymore. It’s a capacity problem.” Nearly four in ten respondents, he added, see improving capability and skills as the single biggest opportunity for meeting delivery commitments.
Modular construction moves toward the mainstream
Juskowiak took the audience through the survey’s findings on modular and off-site construction, describing them as among the most encouraging in the research. 96% of respondents said they were familiar with modular construction, and 90% understood how it could support their organisation’s regulatory commitments. Yet only two-thirds expected modular to be involved in at least a quarter of solutions by 2030, a gap Juskowiak challenged directly: “Two-thirds expect modular to be involved in solutions by 2030. Now, I actually think that that’s incredibly low.” He argued the real question was no longer why modular is growing, but how the sector moves from awareness to adoption, addressing barriers around specifications, systems and skills.
He described RSE’s own model, in which 85% of resources are spent inside the manufacturing facility and only 15% in the field, allowing controls to be designed, integrated and tested before a unit ever reaches site. As an example, he pointed to Hampton Loade Water Treatment Works, delivered for South Staffs Water and, until this year, the largest ceramic membrane plant in the world. Twenty ceramic membrane units were delivered in just over two years into an existing operational asset serving nearly three quarters of a million customers, brought online one filter at a time without interrupting supply.
A live poll asked attendees where they saw the greatest opportunity for modular delivery in their own organisation over the next five years. Reducing delivery timescales won with 38%, ahead of addressing skills and resource constraints on 28%.
A digital readiness gap, and where resilience now sits
Turning to digital transformation, Slessor said the finding that surprised him most was how far ambition has outpaced readiness: only 3% of water companies said they were fully prepared for the digital requirements of the current regulatory period, and just 45% believed their control systems were fully or mostly prepared. Cybersecurity, cited by 52% of respondents, and legacy equipment, cited by 48%, were the two barriers that stood out clearly from the rest. “Digital transformation in water does not get solved by buying better technology,” he said. “It gets solved by bringing controls, automation, operation technology, and cybersecurity together in one approach.” He linked this back to modular delivery: 85% of respondents believe modular approaches can improve digital readiness, because control systems designed and tested in a factory arrive on site already instrumented and secured, rather than bolted on under time pressure at the end of a traditional build.
Juskowiak then turned to resilience, describing it as a term that can no longer be treated separately from compliance. Almost every respondent said asset life extension was vital to building resilience, and nearly nine in ten said meeting regulatory deadlines remained difficult, with new legislation for PFAS, microplastics, nutrients and phosphorus adding further pressure. To illustrate how the two agendas now meet in practice, he cited RSE’s work with Scottish Water on its river basin management plan, involving phosphorus compliance improvements at 30 wastewater treatment sites across Scotland ahead of a strict regulatory deadline, delivered through a standard modular dosing solution housed in low-carbon timber kiosks. “The programme demonstrates that compliance, resilience, and sustainability do not need to be competing priorities,” he said.
A second poll asked what would be the biggest barrier to improving resilience and environmental performance over the next five years. Ageing infrastructure led with 31%, narrowly ahead of workforce and skills availability on 29%.
Closing the gap
Closing the session, Slessor drew out three points of agreement in the research: that delivery pressure is increasing across the board, that capacity rather than money is the binding constraint, and that the delivery model itself has to change, given that 96% of respondents now understand what modular means and 90% believe it can help meet regulatory commitments, even though only 22% currently use it on the majority of their schemes.
In the question and answer session that followed, the speakers addressed audience questions on the drivers behind digitalisation, how automation is shifting from simple binary controls toward asset health analytics, the indicators that make a project suitable for modular delivery, and the scale of the workforce challenge ahead, with roughly 44,000 jobs needed in the water sector alone over the next five years. RSE’s full report, Modular by Design: Closing the Delivery Gap, is due to be published shortly.
