Record UK heat this summer and Met Office warnings of a strong El Niño driving wetter, stormier conditions this autumn and winter are forcing transport authorities to reassess drainage, slope stability and track formation design. Network Rail, local highways teams and port operators are being pushed towards higher-capacity culverts, upgraded ballast and formation drainage, and more robust earthwork reinforcement to cope with prolonged saturation and intense convective storms. For geotechnical and civil engineers, design storms, return periods and climate allowances in asset management plans now need urgent recalibration.

Reuse of existing piled and raft foundations is accelerating on commercial property schemes as clients accept higher investigation spend in exchange for major embodied carbon and programme savings. Engineers are combining detailed pile integrity testing, targeted coring and advanced geotechnical back‑analysis with updated Eurocode‑based reliability methods to justify reusing legacy foundations originally designed for very different load cases. Planning and funding bodies are now more willing to accept partial reuse strategies, shifting project briefs away from default demolition and full replacement towards selective strengthening, load‑sharing and local pile augmentation.

Industry geotechnical specialists at the John Mitchell lecture warned that UK foundation design on chalk is still misjudging key behaviours such as solution features, variable weathering profiles and the risk of brittle collapse under cyclic loading. Speakers pointed to recent pile and shallow foundation projects where inadequate chalk characterisation, limited core recovery and over-reliance on generic SPT correlations led to unexpected settlements and construction delays. Attendees were urged to adopt more rigorous chalk-specific investigation, including targeted boreholes, high-quality sampling and site-specific load testing, before finalising foundation schemes.