By John Challen

Having completed the delivery element of the Department for Transport’s (DfT) ADEPT Live Labs 2 programme in March 2026, work is still ongoing. New funding of £300,000 has recently been allocated by DfT to engage with the highways industry and disseminate the results of the seven projects, as well as talking to communities about the next steps required to move learnings to business as usual.

The seven programmes in the scheme cover a wide range of decarbonisation challenges, from East Riding of Yorkshire Council’s low carbon street lighting to North Lanarkshire Council’s Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads. Taken together, the projects cover the full lifecycle, from planning and procurement to maintenance and operation, providing local highway authorities with new innovations to reduce carbon, save money and improve how roads are planned, built and maintained.

Lasting benefits

Giles Perkins, programme director for Live Labs 2, is happy with how the projects have turned out. “Liverpool’s new approach to procurement and innovation is a game changer in terms of how local authorities can engage with SMEs,” he says. “And the Wessex Live Lab has taken the principles of doughnut economics and put it into their winter maintenance service, which has had a positive impact.”

Perkins says that in East Riding, an integrated approach to street lighting is being rolled out with significant cost and carbon savings. In addition, North Lanarkshire’s approach to using different surfacing materials and rejuvenators is going into their ‘business as usual’ plans, while the ongoing Devon Live Lab continues to deliver benefits, the most significant being the ability to save a year from the construction programme and the preservation of 2,000 trees and shrubs.

South Gloucestershire and West Sussex’s Greenprint verges project is another scheme that’s been retained in the councils’ plans for 2026 and has been so successful it’s opened up further discussions.

“The project has proved that you can cut and collect grass cuttings and derive value from it in the form of producing biochar, which can be used to lock carbon into road schemes,” he says. “While North Lanarkshire used biochar from the Greenprint project to displace bitumen in surface courses, it’s not yet widely used in the UK. So we proved there’s a concept from a technical point of view but it required more industrial investment.”

Live Labs on tour

It’s a busy time for Perkins as he’s also juggling a series of workshops over the UK based on the ADEPT Live Labs 2 programme. Many events have taken place in the north of the UK and are due to start in the south and south west from November. Alongside the workshops, there’s a chance for local authorities to learn more every second Tuesday of the month.

“Our triage service is a monthly drop-in that will be restarting in December,” he says. “This is where people can have a discussion with the project team about their challenges and opportunities and how they could weave Live Lab’s findings into their highway authorities to deliver benefits.

“We are also producing the Little Book of Live Labs,” Perkins continues, “a short compendium that talks about the programme but also, more importantly, what the benefits are in terms of cost, time, carbon, productivity and nature-based benefits. It’s a snapshot of what’s possible with the learnings that we’ve found.”

• For more information on the ADEPT Live Labs 2 programme, click here.

• To find out about the CIHT Transport Decarbonisation Pathway, click here.