Challenge
As Esh Construction is contracted by Northumbrian Water Group to deliver complex engineering projects, ranging from small works to major infrastructure projects, there is a constant need to excavate underground across the numerous sites it works on. To ensure workers can dig safely and avoid accidentally striking existing infrastructure, it needs accurate information about where underground assets are located before work can begin.
From a health and safety perspective, this causes significant hurdles for Esh Construction to overcome. There are often a lot of asset owners (of existing infrastructure underground) to reach out to individually for every single excavation. This can cause significant delays waiting for suitable plans to arrive. When they do arrive, individual plans, which are of varying levels of quality and scale, need to be reviewed. The consequences of this creates confusion operationally, leading to frequent doubt, second guessing, and potential mistakes.
Solution
Esh Construction participated in trials to test the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) platform in 2025, and now use it every day as part of its safe excavation process.
NUAR is a government digital service, providing secure, instant access to a map of underground pipes and cables in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that supports existing safe digging processes. Operated by Ordnance Survey on behalf of the Government, it shares the buried infrastructure data for telecoms, energy, pipeline, water, transport, and local authorities.
The map gives contracted excavators better access to asset data and enables safer and more efficient installation, maintenance, operation, and repairs of buried infrastructure. It increases industry co-ordination, because NUAR is a centralised and secure platform that shares a standardised view of underground asset data on the map. And it increases operational efficiency through instant access to data, reducing multiple requests for information that previously took on average six days to obtain.
Result
Esh Construction found using NUAR as a single platform has cleared up the confusion around where assets lay under the ground and saved significant time waiting for information.
"NUAR is a great tool, we use it every day as part of our safe excavation process. NUAR is used to identify hazards ahead of works, helping to minimise dangers for our site teams, and providing access to a 24/7 live system of underground cables. I find looking at multiple paper maps at different scales and formats very tricky. With NUAR it’s a much better way to identify buried assets. I can see everything in one place on a common platform. I can switch layers on and off and receive the attribute data that I require to enable me to understand what buried assets are in the ground."
Esh Construction’s Project Supervisor, John Hopper, said: “I have been working with and using NUAR since Esh was first introduced to it. NUAR has proven to be a huge asset to our reactive contract and helps with speeding up works and provides ease of assessing underground services for emergency and planned works.”
And Esh Construction’s Foreman, John Ridley, said: “This provides more safety on site, and while out late at night on callouts I can bring up my own NUAR drawings and don’t need to wait around for them to be sent to me. I think this benefits every single person who can gain access to it across all sectors of engineering and construction.”
Scott Thornberry, Functional Consultant for Northumbrian Water Group, said: “Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) works with a broad network of contract partners, including ESH.
“A key challenge we face is that not all contract partners use NWG’s internal corporate systems directly. As a result, we often lack up‑to‑date visibility of the resources they deploy on our behalf, and historically these partners did not receive utility drawings through our internal systems.
“Instead, they were required to source essential information independently, introducing the possibility of inconsistency in the safety and efficiency of work undertaken for NWG.
“The introduction of NUAR has significantly improved this landscape. NUAR enables NWG to grant administrative access to contract partners, who can then manage their own user base. This ensures that every individual working on NWG assets—whether directly employed or contracted—has access to the same accurate and current asset information.
“By equipping our partners with NUAR, we ensure they can carry out their work with the highest level of safety, awareness, and operational consistency. The system supports a shared, unified approach to safe digging practices, reducing risk, improving efficiency, and creating a more aligned working environment across all delivery partners.”