Our May 2026 roundtable turned to financial resilience in regulated infrastructure, asking a question that has moved to the centre of the UK infrastructure debate: How can the system balance the financial resilience that protects utilities against shocks with the affordability pressures that resilience-restoring measures place on consumers? Drawing on Vallorii's Price of Risk model (VAPRI), we explored how the erosion of financial headroom has changed the nature of resilience itself—shifting...

In regulated infrastructure, value is not a fixed concept. The value of an infrastructure asset depends on how it is measured and which accounting basis drives returns. Different accounting frameworks produce markedly different views of the same asset base. Regulatory asset values (RAV), historical cost accounts, and current cost accounts (modern equivalent asset value, MEAV, or replacement cost), each serve distinct purposes. But when the differences between these measures changes,...

Infrastructure debates tend to focus on what should be built next. Yet a more fundamental question sits beneath them: how quickly should we pay for what has already been built? That question goes to the heart of depreciation. As discussions at the March roundtable underscored, it is emerging as a central lever in infrastructure economics and regulation. How does intergenerational fairness impact affordability? Depreciation directly shapes returns, bill trajectories, and risk allocation over...

Our roundtable examined how UK infrastructure markets price resilience. Using Vallorii’s VAPRI and the new VARI index, we showed how environmental stress affects asset performance, equity returns and valuations. Discussion focused on incentives, ODIs and funding gaps, with consensus that resilience remains under-priced and needs explicit inclusion in equity returns.

Measuring the crowding-out effect and what it takes to bring private capital back to “slow” infrastructure in the UK

Projects today face a widening set of power-related uncertainties: delayed grid connections, congestion that limits deliverability, curtailment during peak hours, tightening capacity margins, and growing political scrutiny over who pays for system upgrades.