Locks, gates, sluices, weirs, embankments, culverts, aqueducts and pumping stations are inspected, risk-assessed and maintained on recurring routines that operators must perform and evidence. STAUNCH is the system that runs those routines, with a risk engine deciding which asset gets which routine, how often, and what every pound of budget buys in risk reduction.
England's navigable rivers and canals run on ageing, high-consequence structures. The Environment Agency alone operates around 123 lock sites and roughly 2,500 navigation assets across some 1,010 km of waterway. Every one of them carries a duty of care to the public, and budgets are shrinking while the structures get older.
The core safety workflow is manual. The EA runs around 1,350 Public Safety Risk Assessments a year on navigation assets by hand. In a single season that produced 308 defects and 260 active monitoring instances, recorded in AIMS: OM, a system that is a database, not a risk engine. It stores what happened. It does not decide what should happen next.
The market has left the gap open on both sides. No enterprise asset tool ships what this sector needs: Maximo, Confirm, Alloy and AMX have no water-navigation asset taxonomy, no navigation risk-scoring engine, no InSAR integration, no inspection-interval optimisation and no portfolio investment optimisation. The consultancies that do have the expertise, Jacobs, Mott MacDonald and Arcadis, sell it as expensive one-off studies. The intelligence arrives as a PDF and starts going stale the day it lands.
The sector's regulatory and funding environment has moved decisively towards risk-based asset management. The signals are recent, national, and pointing the same way.
The spillway failure at Toddbrook forced the evacuation of Whaley Bridge and triggered a national review of reservoir safety. It put risk-based surveillance of water-retaining structures on the political agenda.
Water companies must now certify their asset management systems to ISO 55001:2024. The precedent is set in the sector next door: regulators are moving from "show me a register" to "show me a management system".
Around 2,550 regulated reservoirs are moving to risk-tiered regulation. Risk-proportionate inspection regimes, exactly what STAUNCH productises, become the statutory norm for water infrastructure.
A deep-seated, sub-surface failure that visual inspection could never have caught. It is the exact case for satellite InSAR movement monitoring, and it has triggered a national review of waterway earthworks. Every waterway operator in the country is now being asked the same question: how would you have seen this coming?
The EA's flood and coastal erosion risk management programme puts a funded decade behind exactly this asset base. Navigation capital runs at roughly GBP 30m a year, with FCERM maintenance around GBP 262m a year. The money to justify with evidence is already allocated.
A frictionless procurement route to the EA and all 300+ Lead Local Flood Authorities. A listed SaaS product can be bought without a bespoke tender. The channel to every target buyer already exists.
An operator's duty of care is discharged through recurring routines: inspection rounds, Public Safety Risk Assessments, continuous surveillance and planned maintenance. STAUNCH runs those routines end to end, and its risk engine decides the schedule: which asset, which routine, how often. High-consequence assets earn intensive attention. Low-consequence assets stop wasting it. The screens below show the product as designed.
The whole network on one screen: a risk-ranked asset register on a schematic waterway map, and the routines falling due this week.
| PSRA renewal | Days Lock | Due 3d |
| Tactile inspection | E-117 embankment | Overdue |
| Gate leaf survey | Culham Lock | Due 6d |
| Culvert CCTV | C-2114 barrel | Due 7d |
| InSAR review | Reach 12 earthworks | Due 2d |
| PSRA renewal | Benson Weir apron | Due 4d |
| Rank | Asset | Type | WACI | Criticality | Risk score | Status | Next routine |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Embankment E-117 · Reach 12 | Embankment | 41.2 | Very high | 92.4 | High | Tactile · overdue |
| 02 | Days Lock · chamber wall | Lock | 54.7 | High | 74.1 | Elevated | PSRA · 3 days |
| 03 | Benson Weir · apron | Weir | 58.9 | High | 68.8 | Elevated | PSRA · 4 days |
| 04 | Culvert C-2114 · barrel | Culvert | 63.0 | Medium | 51.6 | Managed | CCTV · 7 days |
| 05 | Culham Lock · gate leaves | Lock | 77.4 | High | 44.9 | Managed | Gate survey · 6 days |
The heart of the product. The risk engine sets every inspection interval: annual tactile inspections on high-consequence locks, multi-year general inspections on low-consequence culverts. Every interval carries its reasoning.
| Asset | Routine | Risk driver | Interval | Last done | Next due | Cycle | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Days Lock · chamber | Tactile inspection | High footfall · WACI 54.7 | 12 mo | 14 Aug 25 | 14 Aug 26 | Intensive | |
| Embankment E-117 | InSAR + walkover | Sub-surface movement | Continuous | 6-day revisit | rolling | Surveillance | |
| Benson Weir · apron | PSRA renewal | Public access · drowning hazard | 12 mo | 29 Jul 25 | 29 Jul 26 | Elevated | |
| Culham Lock · gates | Gate leaf survey | Mechanical criticality | 24 mo | 02 Aug 24 | 02 Aug 26 | Standard | |
| Culvert C-2114 | General CCTV | Low consequence · stable WACI | 72 mo | 11 Mar 21 | 11 Mar 27 | Extended | |
| Clifton Weir · sluice | Operational check | Flood conveyance role | 6 mo | 02 Jun 26 | 02 Dec 26 | On track | |
| Goring Gauging Stn | Instrument calibration | Data criticality | 12 mo | 20 Feb 26 | 20 Feb 27 | On track |
The Waterway Asset Condition Index, built on the highways Bridge Condition Indicator method (DMRB CS 450), scored per component.
| Chamber wall · u/s | 48.1 | C | |
| Gate leaves · head | 57.6 | C | |
| Cill & quoins | 71.2 | B | |
| Paddle gear | 39.4 | D |
Free Sentinel-1 satellite data reads embankment movement in millimetres, the failure mode visual inspection cannot see.
The risk register becomes a budget-constrained programme. The question every board asks, answered live: what does GBP X buy in risk reduction?
| E-117 toe drainage + regrade | £420k | -18.2 risk pts |
| Days Lock paddle gear renewal | £185k | -9.6 risk pts |
| Benson Weir apron scour repair | £310k | -8.1 risk pts |
Board and regulator ready. Statutory compliance, audit trail and ISO 55001 artefacts generated as a by-product of daily use.
| Inspection routines completed to schedule | 97.2% | Pass | |
| High-risk assets on ≤ 12 mo cycle | 100% | Pass | |
| Defects with mitigation in place | 94.1% | Pass | |
| Surveillance data reviewed in period | 88.7% | Watch |
| Strategic Asset Management Plan | v4.2 | Current |
| Risk & criticality methodology | v2.3 | Current |
| Line of sight: objectives → routines | live | Traced |
Everything hangs off a map-first system of record with a network, reach, asset and component hierarchy. Each module productises mature practice from a sector that solved this problem decades ago.
The asset register and map. Network to reach to asset to component. The system of record.
Foundation · the spatial spineConfigurable, offline-first mobile inspection routines per asset type. Condition grading and defect logging in the field.
Imports from · highwaysThe differentiator. Condition, criticality and likelihood combine into a risk-ranked register with do-nothing deterioration forecasting.
Imports from · dams & railTurns the risk register into cost-optimised, budget-constrained investment programmes. What does GBP X buy in risk reduction?
Imports from · water utilitiesRaise, schedule, assign and track works and contractors against assets, with contract management built in.
Imports from · highways & railThe evidence that proves duty of care: statutory-compliance tracking, audit trail, incident logging, board and regulator dashboards, ISO 55001 artefacts.
Imports from · regulated utilitiesContinuous risk. InSAR satellite embankment monitoring, IoT structural sensors, drone and LiDAR capture.
Imports from · rail earthworksGIS interop with Esri and QGIS, EA and NRW open-data ingestion, EAM interop and an open API.
Imports from · open geospatialA single, defensible condition number for every structure on the water. Built on the highways Bridge Condition Indicator method (DMRB CS 450) and applied to lock chambers, gate leaves, weir aprons, embankment profiles and culvert barrels. It gives operators, boards and regulators a common language for condition, and it gives STAUNCH the calibrated input its risk engine runs on.
Failure-mode, effects and criticality libraries per asset type, drawn from offshore and ports integrity practice. A buyer inherits a validated risk model on day one instead of paying a consultancy to build one from scratch.
From offshore & ports integrityFree Sentinel-1 satellite data detects millimetre-scale embankment movement, the deep-seated failure mode that caused Whitchurch and that visual inspection cannot see. Network Rail already runs this on its earthworks.
From rail earthworks monitoringAnnual tactile inspections on high-consequence locks. Multi-year general inspections on low-consequence culverts. Inspection effort follows risk, not habit, and the saved hours are redeployed where they matter.
Interval optimisation engineThe evidence pack regulators increasingly demand is generated from daily use, not assembled in a scramble before an audit. Line of sight from organisational objectives to individual routines, traced automatically.
Assurance by design~123 lock sites, ~2,500 navigation assets, ~1,010 km of waterway. Navigation capital of roughly GBP 30m a year and FCERM maintenance around GBP 262m a year, inside a GBP 7.9bn capital programme to 2036. The PSRA workflow is the bounded, funded, procurement-ready entry point.
The same statutory duties, asset classes and evidence burden on the Welsh network. A near-identical deployment once the EA reference exists, reached through the same public-sector channels.
Every LLFA carries flood-asset duties with council-scale budgets and, typically, spreadsheet-scale tooling. CAMS proved this market buys simple registers. G-Cloud 15 lets them buy STAUNCH without a bespoke tender.
Reached in one motion through a collective licence with their umbrella body. Lightweight deployments, a shared taxonomy, and a national footprint of river structures under management.
Digitise the ~1,350 manual assessments a year. Bounded scope, existing budget, immediate saving.
Once the register and risk engine are live, the investment and assurance modules sell themselves upward.
Replicate the EA deployment on the Welsh network with the reference case in hand.
Volume expansion through G-Cloud 15. Standard product, repeatable onboarding.
~65 trusts via a collective licence with the umbrella body.
The country has just been reminded, twice, what it costs when high-consequence water infrastructure is managed on habit and paper. STAUNCH exists so that the next Whitchurch shows up as an amber alert months early, not a breach on the news. The third Infinite Axis deep-tech venture, alongside Furrow and Savernake, applying the same playbook: take a duty that is discharged manually, put a deterministic engine behind it, and sell the evidence.