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In this episode, we look at the work of the Pipeline Industries Guild, in facilitating connections and learning for pipeliners of all kinds in the UK. Featured guests: Kate Lazenby, Executive Director, Pipeline Industries Guild, and Barry Hayward, Pipeline Industries Guild Chair, and Chief Commercial Officer at South Staffordshire Plc.
Sponsoring this episode of the World Pipelines Podcast is the TDW SmartPlug® Isolation System — The safest inline isolation system on the market. Learn more here.
Sponsoring this episode of the World Pipelines Podcast is the TDW SmartPlug® Isolation System — The safest inline isolation system on the market. Learn more here.
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What is World Pipelines Podcast?
The World Pipelines podcast, with Elizabeth Corner, is a podcast that connects and unites pipeline professionals to learn about issues affecting the midstream oil and gas industry.
Hello, and welcome to the World Pipelines Podcast, a podcast series for pipeliners featuring short, insightful interviews with people in the pipeline industry. I'm your host, Elizabeth Korner. And in this season of the podcast, I am talking to people from membership associations for the pipeline sector. Throughout the series, we're exploring exactly what these associations do to move the midstream sector forwards and to support pipeliners all over the world.
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Elizabeth Corner:In this episode, I am pleased to welcome Kate Lazenby, who is executive director at the Pipeline Industries Guild, and Barry Hayward, Guild chair and chief commercial officer at South Staffordshire plc. So hello to both of you. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome.
Kate Lazenby:Morning. Thank you.
Elizabeth Corner:To help us understand the Pipeline Industries Guild, perhaps you could introduce us to the Guild and its role within The UK pipeline sector.
Kate Lazenby:Thanks Elizabeth. Thank you again for having the Pipeline Industry Guild. So a little bit about the Guild. We were established back in 1957, so a long well established Guild. As you can imagine, we have gone through a series of developments over the years to ensure we remain fit for purpose.
Kate Lazenby:I've been part of the guild now for over ten years and within this role, I've been in it for three years now and only recently we've just modernised and revised our missions and our values. So we have now moved across to what we're deeming a trusted platform for professionals, skilled workers and leaders across the pipeline and infrastructure industry, which is regardless of discipline and sector. As you've mentioned, we've got Barry here today who is our chair. The Guild is made up of a variety of volunteers which are all from our member organisations. We have a president at the top who sits for two years as a as a two year tenure, and then we have the chair, and then we have our exec and board.
Kate Lazenby:All of those are made up, as I said, from from volunteers from a variety of organizations, gas, water, technology companies, you name it, we have somebody within the Guild that can offer that kind of expertise.
Elizabeth Corner:And I wonder if you can tell me what are the Guild's core values and then how do those values reflect the the unique needs of The UK pipeline industry?
Kate Lazenby:That's a great question. So our values: nice high level, pioneering, collaborative, sustainable and supporting. Those four elements really underpin everything that the Guild does. So, 'pioneing' if we take that first, we aim to champion and share new ideas to be able to create a sustainable future. That is the goal of the Guild, to be able to do knowledge sharing and transferring of information across a variety of sectors.
Kate Lazenby:The collaboration element is is obviously key to to what we do. As I said before, we are a membership organisation. Collaboration is key across all of our disciplines and all of our sectors. So through a variety of networking events, conferences, webinars, thought leadership pieces through our In The Pipeline magazine that's an online quarterly publication. We can collaborate through our members, and through our branches and our technical panels.
Kate Lazenby:Sustainable. This is progressing resilient and sustainable projects and technologies within our industry. Again, we feature many webinars, we hold technical events, we have site visits. So the sustainable element obviously feeds throughout all of the Guild. And we also have a net zero panel that specifically focuses on the whole development around the green agenda.
Kate Lazenby:And then last but by no means least is supporting. As a value, supporting each other and nurturing talent. We have a professional development network which is, anybody in the industry under 35. And this is a real focus and drive for the Guild to be able to support and develop new talent into the industry and not just nurture it but attract and retain the talent that we've got today.
Elizabeth Corner:Fantastic. Now you mentioned that the Guild covers a wide range of pipeline sectors. How does it ensure representation and inclusivity across these diverse industries? So across oil, gas, water, and so on.
Barry Hayward:I think that the Guild has a unique position in lots of our industries where we don't specialize on one specific sector. It looks to look across all of the best practice from everywhere. And one of the things that we are very passionate about is that it is about what you bring to the guild, not who you are. So, for example, unusually, for one of our organizations, 25% of our board and exec are women. That's it was actually higher last year, so it does wax and wane, but that's because women do take a big part of our industry and do add a great voice, going in.
Barry Hayward:We also have done well-being webinars and all the things that you would expect. But but in terms of, like, really going back to our core values and what do we do and who what we add as as opposed to who we are. This year, we can openly say that the guild is led by Kate Excellently who is a woman and is chaired by an out gay man. So inclusivity doesn't seem to be a problem that we suffer from because we focus on that knowledge sharing.
Elizabeth Corner:Great to hear. And I wonder how the guild engages with professionals at all different career levels. So, how do you engage with an apprentice and then how might that differ if you're talking to a senior leader in the industry?
Barry Hayward:We've got loads of different levels, which my myself, I've, I've been involved with the guild for almost twenty years. I've been on the board for ten. And I can say that, when I was just starting out in my career, it was excellent to be able to be part of the PDN, our professional development network. And, more recently, we've expanded that for links to other industries and organizations where they help us support STEM in schools. So a little bit before that in the apprentice space as you were saying, including, I'm sure we'll touch on it, solutions for the planet who actually work in schools, at at at really influencing at a young age.
Barry Hayward:After that, we have the webinars, the exhibitions, our conferences, our learn at lunch events, all where we bring people together so you can make those great connections. And for me, one of the benefits of doing that is hearing from industry leaders what their problems are so that I might be able to work with a team to find a solution. I've benefited massively from mentoring, through those connections, and I myself now give that back as a mentor. So they got all different levels of your career. The guild does provide something that you can engage with, that does advance that.
Elizabeth Corner:Given the guild's cross sector focus, how does it facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing between industries and between industries which have very distinct challenges?
Kate Lazenby:Yes. I think again as as sort of Barry sort of mentioned, we have a variety of different sort of mediums that we we connect with our members through. As we said before sort of networking events, branch levels, and particularly sort of industry challenges that are applicable across all sectors. You know, leakage, if you tell that as a topic, it's applicable across all industries. And actually, when we we host sort of variety of sort of site visits, you're gonna get people that are going there.
Kate Lazenby:So only recently I went to one of our members' pipe manufacturing centers and we had a variety of people in the room, not just gas people but water sector people as well. And I even had a go at scraping a pipe, which was very exciting. But again, with that, we were talking about specifically scraping technique. I'm going down rabbit hole here, but what was quite interesting was the fact that some of the techniques that are used specifically in the water sector aren't necessarily used in the gas sector. So hence, as I say, when you have that diversity of thinking within the room, people ask those sort of different questions.
Kate Lazenby:So it is it's specific technique of of rotary scraping versus hand scraping actually applies to the the rotary element applies to the water sectors quite specifically. And in my little my world, that looked like quite a sensible, very neat, scrape. Whereas when you're hand scraping, within the gas sector, not so easy to get that clean, and effective scraping. Appreciate that's very, very specific. But, actually, it was really interesting to get that different kind of questioning and challenge back to the manufacturer, from the different sectors.
Kate Lazenby:So we have site visits that can can obviously sort of help collaborate. We will also have elements of of larger projects. There's also a larger project update. Probably a few years ago now we had a really great webinar with, HS2 and obviously appreciate that was that obviously got quite a lot of interest. But again when we have people that are coming in from all different sectors, ultimately that sort of major project is going to cut across all of those sectors.
Kate Lazenby:So enabling people and facilitating these sessions so that people can kind of get involved and ask those questions that perhaps you wouldn't necessarily if you were in your day job going along working things through. Actually when you're looking at it from a different industry it just brings a bit of different thought processes.
Elizabeth Corner:So there are a lot of things that perhaps are relevant across the different sectors and then within your niches you have to be very specific. Brilliant. And are there any specific projects or case studies where cross sector collaboration through the Guild has driven some sort of innovation or an industry improvement?
Barry Hayward:So we've got lots of examples where we we do focus on specific problems within industry as well as broader, sector wide, pipeline issues. So a couple of great examples from the water sector that popped up recently. The challenges for the water sector in terms of combined sewer overflows and public perception of those has been quite dramatic in the last eighteen months. And I think the water companies have not won the public on that, and they are not very good explaining, what that technically means, but also the innovation that drives that. So we have set, set up a new panel to be very agile and nimble.
Barry Hayward:The wastewater panels look at that specifically. We've got industry body leaders from the government as well as our our regulatory partners and, technical people on the panel to look at those solutions. We probably haven't found the silver bullet, but we have found all sorts of great filtering technologies, sharing of kind of pump efficiency curves, for different pumps when it comes to the environment, and have been lobbying for actually a slight change of regulation to enable some of those, innovative solutions to work through. In the same way that regulation 31 of the water quality legislation with the DWI has caused some problems currently where we don't have enough capacity in laboratories to test and do the toxicology work for all of those. So as a whole guild, we've been engaged in writing and lobbying both political parties and the regulator to understand that and to make sure that our supply chain members and partners aren't caught up.
Barry Hayward:What is a regulatory, almost foible, that they found themselves in? There's very specific things that we focus on that bring kind of innovation and drive that forward, as well as sector wide problems. So we are most watched YouTube video, which I would recommend from anybody to go and have a look at, is on cathodic protection. Who doesn't like to talk about cathodic protection is, kind of should be the the strap line. But it's actually a great innovative, clear, upskilling approach we've taken there.
Barry Hayward:And our annual last year, a carbon accounting conference, we're looking at how do we bring carbon accounting standards to the pipeline sectors as a whole. It's gonna be followed this year with a great initiative we're probably gonna be launched, so I don't wanna give you spoilers. But the output from our members, we understand the problems now and challenges, and we will bring forward a solution this year, which I think will really help with that.
Elizabeth Corner:Brilliant. We love cathodic protection here at World Pipeline, so I'm very happy to hear that. I wonder what role the Guild plays in promoting sustainability and, maybe you can talk me through how the Guild might support The UK's climate goals within the pipeline sector.
Kate Lazenby:With our approach to, ensuring the Guild, it remains fit for purpose throughout its life. We launched a Guild 2025 strategy back in 2020, and that five year strategy was looking at a whole myriad of themes through from our sort of membership engagement through to the way that we work as a team and our events, etcetera. But one of those is around sustainability. That was a key theme that was was being sort of driven through that strategy piece. So we launched a sustainability theme, which basically ran off the UN sustainability goals.
Kate Lazenby:So a few of those I can just touch on now that we worked through. So obviously we have a HQ, so one of the goals around responsible consumption and production. The Guild office has now actually moved to Locksmith Mill, which is actually has some amazing green qualities. You know, the toilets are being used with being flushed through grey water. There's all recycling in place.
Kate Lazenby:There's vehicle charging point. It's actually just a really nice place because you can look over some really nice countryside and see some wonderful sheep, which is lovely. From our HQ perspective, we've adapted and and looked at our own sort of, operations. And again, through sort of a lot of our events as well, we try to reduce the amount of of non recyclable merchandise and products at events, and exhibitions. That's a key thing for us.
Kate Lazenby:And also from a a a wider sort of piece when we're planning events, ensuring that particularly some of our events where they tend to be sort of industry wide dinners, ensuring that there is policy in place for for wasted or or reducing a wastage of foods. And even we had an event at Wales and in Wales and West Branch A Few Years ago where we teamed up with one of the local homeless charities to ensure that any of the leftover food was was not going to waste. So, again, those sorts of initiatives, we're really keen to sort of promote both through our HQ daily operations and through the wider events that we host. Another big piece that, obviously, Bara sort of recently touched on as well with with regards to gender equality, Again, both within the HQ operations but within the wider board, having a quarter of the board being made up of females is is excellent. You know, obviously, I am a female as as Barry said, and and it is great to see that the the shift change within the guild of of how that female sort of male split is is starting to take shape.
Kate Lazenby:And as as Barry sort of said, it does wax and wane. However, it's great to see it shifting in the right direction. And then I think the only other piece that we have focused on, specifically through this this 2025 strategy was around the the quality of education. As Barry sort of mentioned and and touched on, we we've we've partnered with Solutions for the Planet. So that's a great initiative to educate the young to get in through STEM initiatives.
Kate Lazenby:We've hosted a STEM webinar for a couple of our STEM ambassadors within the Guild as again through the membership. And we have done a number of strengthening exercises with our academic affiliates. So I recently we had a we hosted an exec meeting and then we had, a great site tour at Loughborough University. They've been really supportive of the Guild and its its activities. And with those academic links, we're really starting to see some sort of shifts and some exciting developments with with those conversations.
Elizabeth Corner:Wonderful. Really nice to hear the micro and the macro aspects of sustainability there. And I'm glad you mentioned the dinner because the Guild is known for its famed dinner, I believe, along with its other events. Maybe you could share with me some highlights from recent events and explain what they mean to members and what how they help members.
Kate Lazenby:Indeed, yes. So we do have a very famous dinner that takes place in March. There are still some tickets left if you want to get on and, and book. And whenever this podcast goes live, there'll always be opportunities to book for next year. A highlight for me, we had Ramesh Ranganathan, and his entrance into the great room at the Grosvenor Hotel was Hello Pipers.
Kate Lazenby:That literally lit the room up. I think everybody felt a real sense of pride, a real sense of community, actually. And it stuck. So I think even now people still kind of introduce themselves and sort of go 'Hello Piper'. So it's a really, really nice community kind of theme that's sort of threaded through, from that sort of dinner.
Kate Lazenby:But yes, the dinners themselves are an excellent opportunity to network. It is quite a unique event with industry leaders, developing professionals and all those in between from all the different sectors all coming together to celebrate the whole initiatives that are going on through the industry. It's an opportunity for for people to get together to make new friends, make new connections.
Barry Hayward:But
Kate Lazenby:ultimately, you're getting that opportunity to network with these industry leaders that you probably wouldn't necessarily get to do in your day to day job. I think with the dinners themselves, they provide that opportunity. We have our awards, we have our Honorary Life Awards that take place and we also have what's called the Ruth Allen Award and that is specifically for our developing professionals that have gone sort of above and beyond within the industry. And there are a few other awards as well but but the PDN and the Ruth Allen is is something quite special. I I have won it, once before so, it is it's super special.
Kate Lazenby:It's it's a great opportunity and a great platform for really shouting out about the great words that that developing people are are going along with. And I think from from just that whole opportunity to be able to to network in that room, is really special. I think you have to be into one to really understand how exciting that room is and that industry date in the diary.
Elizabeth Corner:And now having spoken to a lot of different pipeline organisations for this podcast, I know that the networking is so important. So it's really lovely to hear that you put that at the forefront too. And how about skills development? So how are you contributing to skills development for your members, particularly as The UK pipeline sector faces, let's say, evolving needs in terms of keeping up with technology and meeting sustainability goals?
Barry Hayward:I definitely feel that the the next generation, the people that follow us are so important to what we we do as a guild. The reason we have the PDN and the access to guild leaders is that you do actually get a little bit out of touch of what goes on at the the the coalface, and having that direct interaction, that reverse mentoring movement as a leader is super helpful. But we do focus on that all the time. So we have the STEM ambassador webinars that we've done. We do support, as we said, solutions for the planet.
Barry Hayward:We will do anything when it comes to kind of CV writing and support. We have a whole CV writing webinar coming up to try and and support the people that do that. We kinda actively pair with our partners. So we had one of our members facilitate a group of or section of workshops, United Action Through Learning, which was really about kind of bringing those activities to the fore. We encourage mentoring, so we do both formal and informal mentoring as well as technical mentoring, through our panels.
Barry Hayward:And we encourage all our young people to come onto our panels so that they can see what the very, very technical people talk about, especially if we're changing the standard. We're very excited about some of the concrete stuff at the moment, and what what should or shouldn't we put in concrete to make it green. So there's some great conversations that you can you can engage in, but, really, it's enabling people to do that themselves and creating those those great routes through that I think is the guild's responsibility.
Kate Lazenby:I think just to add on that, Barry, that was that was a really good point about the PDN training day. So, again, with with the skills kind of gap being quite a a relevant sort of topic, that the PDN hosts a training day every year ahead of our our guild dinner. And again, those those forms a variety of sort of topics that that are are in the season of challenging. But those PDN opportunities, again, that's different people coming from different organisations, but getting to speak with different kind of key leaders. We have facilitated workshops within those train days as well, and some of those have sort of featured through the SCUBE United Action Through Learning platform.
Kate Lazenby:So again, it's bringing all of those sort of pieces together. So those those train days and with the technical participation as well with our conferences.
Elizabeth Corner:Yeah. Great. I wonder if the Guild has a global outlook in any way. So are there initiatives within the Guild that focus on global best practices or that might provide members with exposure to international trends or insight into global activities?
Kate Lazenby:Yep. Great question. So we do have an international panel and the purpose of the international panel is to showcase both UK and international innovation, and share best practice in the infrastructure industries. So we also, as Barris sort of mentioned, we have strategic partners. One of our strategic partners is Iplocka.
Kate Lazenby:And we obviously, part of then what's called the World Federation, so that that encompasses both the Guild from a UK perspective and then our sister organisations such as Pipeline Contractors Association of Canada, Distribution Contractors Association and Pipeline Contractors Association. We do partner with both the Blocker for various sorts of events and as I say through and and channeled and and sort of driven through our our international panel. We host a series of webinars. Real popular one we had recently was on, Neon. That was really exciting.
Kate Lazenby:So again, if anybody's checking out our YouTube channel, go and have a look at that one. That was that was exciting. So so it's really international sort of element. We do ensure that we are partnering with the rights of strategic partners and and ultimately feeding through some international webinars. Again, no spoiler alerts but, there's a few ideas for for some sort of wider interaction there.
Kate Lazenby:But from the way that the panel is sort of set up as well, we've got representation from both our branches and our panels, but also our members. So we've we've got some real key members that are not just operating in The UK markets but across the the international sort of space, And they are super supportive as well, both from the guild perspective and through Epilocker. So we get that real kinda nice cross pollination of what's going out in the international markets versus what's happening in The UK and being able to sort of swap ideas and promote really what's going on.
Elizabeth Corner:Wonderful. I wonder what the guild sees as the biggest challenge or maybe the biggest opportunity for The UK pipeline sector in in the coming years.
Barry Hayward:I think the opportunities and the challenges are probably the same. So I'm sure Kate will have a view on this as well, because we talk about these, quite frequently as a guild. But the two big ones for me are regulation. So the ever changing demands of regulation, bring great investment, but also technically some real challenges. So the, TCFD requirements and the CSRD requirements of our lenders grew with everything that we do, that we need to be more sustainable, that we need better technology, and we need to be more innovative in an industry that actually prides itself on cost control for stability.
Barry Hayward:So trying to add innovation into surety is really complicated. And when we put stuff in, we can't take it out for twenty five, thirty years. We have to operate it at the lowest cost. There's a great, great topic that we we talk about a lot, which is that whole balance between the two. I also think that public perception is massive.
Barry Hayward:We've seen a huge focus on all of the pipeline sectors with the the either the change of energy strategy to three molecule approach, which is being promoted for heating our homes, or the the fact that people no longer want, sewage companies to pollute rivers even if it's only, a minor impact. That's just no longer acceptable. And keeping pace with public opinion in our new world is for an industry again that's about surety and control in long term, is a real challenge for us. I don't think there's a clear answer for, but there's an opportunity to do more and do it better. So I think that the guild, really inputs on quite a lot of those topics with our regulators, our customers, and our supply chain to drive some of that forward.
Kate Lazenby:I think on on that opportunity challenge piece, absolutely, along with the the technical, the public perception elements, but also, as I said before, the skills gap. I think that attracting new talent but also retaining it is is so key. But from the other end of the spectrum is the transfer of knowledge from the the ever retiring workforce and that is a real challenge but again, through the through the Guild we do have a variety of working sort of groups. We also have our what's called our Past Chair Forum and that is a great wealth of knowledge that they are just willing to impart. So we have both the the PCF and the PDN at both ends of the spectrum helping to sort of shape and and transfer knowledge.
Kate Lazenby:So the the skills gap, whilst it is a challenge, I think there's plenty of opportunity. And as Barry sort of mentioned before around innovation and appealing to younger generations, there's some really great work going on in the industry. So it's exciting times.
Elizabeth Corner:And then to wrap things up, as we look to the future, as we're thinking about the new, new personnel coming into the industry, How is the Guild preparing its members for future developments? So I'm thinking about green hydrogen, I'm thinking about other alternative energies being put into existing infrastructure. How are you tackling that challenge?
Barry Hayward:So so the Guild actively has members in Project Union, Spade Adam, the the scope two t connect program, Hynet, where we engaged with all those. We held our own conference last year, hydrogen, all sectors together. Because I think what we've realized is that whilst the technical elements of all of those, individual changes are important, actually bringing that together with the power generators is gonna be really key. What we're really doing in that is changing the way that the grids is powered. So we are looking at actively now a power panel that will help us support our members through some of those changes, as we look forward.
Barry Hayward:And that may seem strange for a pipeline, guild to be talking about power, but we still need to put stuff in the pipe, and we need to make sure we're doing that in the best way possible, and we need to make sure we take all of those innovative ideas and maximize that everywhere. Hydro is a great storage medium, but it's not the only answer. And as we look, because we like to talk across all sectors, actually, what we do to power and and move that around in the future needs to change too. Disaggregated power networks are coming whether we like it or not. The private wire, energy approach, is and sleeving is so important.
Barry Hayward:I think water companies will tell you 60 to 70% of everything that they use in power is moving the product, not generating the product. So having green ways disaggregated to do that linked to some of these other activities will be a great way to bring that innovation to all of our our members. But for now, we're actively engaged in telling people they should think about it and be clear about it, and we do think those projects are so key to give us the knowledge to do the right thing in the future.
Elizabeth Corner:Brilliant. Anybody got any last thoughts that you want to tag on to the end of this?
Barry Hayward:I'd say if you're not already a member of the Guild, look us up. We are quite broad, and I think our USP does stand out in some of the answers that we've given. We are caring, but we're also very technical. And we love that about what we do, and it's why we keep and retain members for so long. Twenty years is quite a long time.
Barry Hayward:There is a twenty year reward, I noticed. But equally, it is fun to to do what we do. And if you are passionate, it is a place to share that passion.
Elizabeth Corner:Thank you so much to Kate and Barry for really giving us a flavor of the platform industry's skill. Thank you.
Kate Lazenby:Thank you, Elizabeth, and thank you all for listening.
Barry Hayward:And thank you from me for listening. And I hope you found that useful.
Elizabeth Corner:Many thanks to Kate Lazenby and Barry Hayward for talking us through how the Pipeline Industries Guild takes care of its members, whether that be by fostering connections within and between sectors, by focusing on inclusivity and education, or by nurturing the skills of their UK based pipers. Thanks for listening to the World Pipelines podcast. Subscribe for free wherever you get your podcasts. If you have enjoyed this episode, please rate and review and forward to a colleague or friend.
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