So just exactly where is 'Cheshire'?
Many moons ago the Pipeline Industries Guild (PIG) asked my then company to undertake a trial of providing a Dial Before You Dig service on their behalf.
It was to be limited to Cheshire and they would appoint a Service Agent to promote and publicise the use of the service to planners and excavators within Cheshire, while we would operate the call-taking and Enquiry processing part of the service.
As we had been doing exactly this for decades in Scotland and Northern Ireland we were able to bring forward issues we knew would need to be addressed - and most of them were actually for the client themselves to clarify.
Imagine the hilarity caused when I tabled one simple question at the first meeting; 'Where is Cheshire?'. The utilities guffawed, the pipeline owners gazed incredulously and all looked at each other - what kind of question is that?
Rather than trying to explain why I had asked such an obviously stupid question, I asked them to each bring in their operational plans showing where they each considered Cheshire to be. We met again a week later and found ourselves with many versions of 'Cheshire'.
Is it as considered by the County Council? Is it as bounded on OS maps? Or is it, as we found, where each asset owner draws their own extents of 'Cheshire' - smaller than the OS plan shows because they only have a couple of installations, or perhaps it is Cheshire-plus to encapsulate assets that go slightly outside Cheshire?
It took a further 3 meetings before we got consensus of where 'Cheshire' was for the purposes of the trial, which ran for a year.
As for the trial itself, well the results were rather mixed. As only pipeline-owners participated the benefit to the callers was quite limited hence calls and callers fell away. What use is a One Call service if you still have to make calls to others?
The hard lessons learned were that Dial Before You Dig needs full participation and not be limited by geography / sector-specific interests. This was not a surprise to us - we already knew that to be the case and had tried to warn them it would happen - but it did seem to come as quite a surprise to PIG.
Dial Before You Dig has to benefit both the Enquirers and the Asset Owners. The Enquirers gets plans and responses, in return the Asset Owners get the chance to protect their services.
Today, National One Call - a totally independent service company - covers the whole of the UK, contacting all asset owners for all work intentions from any Enquirer.
We even give free services to those willing to do all the work themselves, yet another barrier we identified when trying to promote safety for people and protection of services.
The Cheshire Trial was just one of the lessons we were able to draw upon on the way to making Dial Before You Dig work for all stakeholders.