John Lamb | Chair Board for Climate Resillience
UKRLG

John has held public sector directorships at Manchester City Council, Calderdale, Thurrock, Trafford, Buckinghamshire and Essex. Before that, he led major engineering projects and operations at Heathrow and Stansted Airports.
As Chief Officer at Calderdale, he saw first-hand the impact of the 2015 Boxing Day floods. Since then he has championed a better understanding of resilience and response across the civil resilience community. With DfT, he co-led the influential 2021 Deeming report on lessons learned from extreme weather in the highway sector. Its world-leading approach to Rapid Impact Assessment has won UK awards and ministerial recognition. He also led the groundbreaking work on Suspension of Business as Usual (sBAU), which is now a key part of the current refresh of the Code of Practice.
John now chairs UKRLG's National Board for Adaptation, Biodiversity and Climate Resilience, which reaches more than 200 highway authorities across the four nations. He is also the UK's representative on PIARC's Disaster Management Technical Committee.
His message is simple: prepare for the worst day, not the average day. Alongside excellence in winter maintenance, the sector now needs to move to multi-hazard response, 24/7 and 365 days a year.