Engineering company Costain has won a £2m consultancy programme management contract to deliver a smart street lighting project and future IoT services to the UK city of Bradford.
 
The project will involve the replacement of 59,000 lights and 17,000 lampposts across the city over a period of four years.
 
The energy-efficient LED lights will be controlled by a central management system (CMS) that will allow remote control of illumination levels with switch on-off times to deliver environmental and safety benefits. The CMS also provides the backbone for the inclusion of additional IoT services.
 
The project aims to reduce the city’s street lighting power consumption by 65% and its carbon emissions by over 6000 tonnes per year, helping the local council meet its climate change strategy targets and saving taxpayers an estimated £189m over 50 years.
 
The ability to support a wide range of emerging IoT technologies will potentially assist the council in making further cost savings in other areas in the future. Costain will work with the council to ensure additional IoT capabilities can be easily enabled to measure things such as road temperatures, air pollution, road gully condition or river levels to target maintenance and capital programmes.
 
This consultancy contract win builds on UK-based Costain’s three year relationship with Bradford, which has culminated in its current status as strategic delivery partner and the development of a high level plan to give an overall picture of £500m worth of capital delivery programmes within the city. The plan ensures integration and governance of the programmes associated with the Transforming Cities Fund, which seeks to improve productivity and prosperity through sustainable transport development, as well as other road, rail and multi-modal programmes.
 
Costain brings experience in working with the UK Department for Transport and Highways England, a broader understanding of the UK infrastructure landscape, and decades of delivery heritage.
 
“Local authorities are under huge pressure to continue delivery of critical programmes of work for their communities,” said Sue Kershaw, transportation managing director for Costain. “Our relationship with Bradford Council, which focuses on partnership and outcomes, has allowed us to reach back into our organisation to deliver additional capacity, capability, resilience and flexibility in a range of areas to support our client and keep the transport infrastructure services working.”
 
This work supporting Bradford Council also demonstrates Costain’s commitment to helping clients accelerate the transition to a net zero carbon economy, made as part of its Climate Change Action plan launched in February 2020, and is another step in fulfilling its ambition to lead UK infrastructure into a zero carbon future by 2035 at the latest, supporting the UK government in meeting its 2050 target.
 
“Bradford’s smart street lighting programme represents a major investment in one of the biggest assets of the council – our 59,000 street lighting columns,” said councillor Alex Ross-Shaw, executive member for regeneration, planning and transport. “The ability to ensure effective delivery of the contract was paramount in Bradford’s approach to seeking a delivery partner with the skills, knowledge and ability to drive both the financial savings and the associated positive contribution to our CO₂ emissions, which are key outputs over the next five years. The appointment of Costain to the strategic delivery partner role has given Bradford the confidence that we have the right people helping us achieve these outcomes based on our experience of their involvement in our programmes of transport investment in the district.”