Egis has appointed Jamie Gleave as senior environmental impact assessment technical director for the UK, bringing more than 25 years’ experience across energy, transport and water infrastructure, including Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station and National Grid electricity transmission schemes. Gleave previously served as EIA technical director at AECOM, where he led its global EIA technical excellence practice and directed environmental work on the A428 Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet and M42 Junction 6 DCO schemes, acting as expert witness. He will work with UK–Ireland head of environment Afshan Rasheed to build Egis’s EIA, DCO and technical assurance capability.

United Utilities has been fined £900,000 after admitting five environmental permit breaches linked to a major raw sewage discharge on the Fylde coast in June 2023, following failures in its wastewater treatment and overflow control systems. The incident involved untreated effluent bypassing normal screening and settlement processes during storm conditions, leading to prolonged discharge through combined sewer overflows into coastal waters used for bathing. For civil and environmental engineers, the case reinforces regulatory scrutiny on stormwater storage capacity, real-time CSO monitoring, and resilience of ageing sewer networks under intense rainfall events.

Eighty-three per cent of Britain’s cities – 59 urban areas – are classed as highly vulnerable to urban heat in new spatial analysis by Ordnance Survey, the Met Office and 4 Earth Intelligence. The dataset combines OS building footprints, surface cover and green space with Met Office temperature projections to map local heat exposure at street-block scale. For civil and geotechnical engineers, this points to urgent retrofit of shading, permeable and high-albedo surfaces, and revised pavement and rail design to cope with more frequent extreme surface temperatures.