Interview: Newly rebranded Mining Remediation Authority CEO on its growing responsibilities

The MRA is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and is responsible for managing assets left by the legacy of coal mining in Great Britain.

NCE spoke with MRA CEO Lisa Pinney to learn more about why the Coal Authority had decided to rebrand and about the work the organisation does.

Why Pinney joined the MRA

Pinney said, before her current role, she spent most of her career at the Environment Agency. She said there was “a lot of similarity” between the work of the Environment Agency and that of the MRA, “particularly in terms of water treatment works”.

She pointed to “the public safety and subsidence work [the MRA does] with things like flood risk management. It’s all about things which affect people’s homes.

“I felt there was a lot of experience that I could bring, particularly on [the MRA’s] emergency response angle and community delivery.”

MRA designated as emergency responders

Pinney said emergency response had “always been an important part” of the MRA’s work, but the organisation officially became category two responders under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 in 2023.

At the time, other examples of category two responder organisations included utility bodies such as gas, electric and water companies, as well as transport bodies like Transport for London and National Highways.

Alongside the MRA, the Met Office was also designated in 2023 as a category two response organisation.

The change of categorisation was to “enable these organisations to more effectively share information and engage with other responders, via LRFs (local resilience forums) or equivalent forums across the UK”, according to the amendment to the Act.

Further, the recategorisation recognised “the integral role of these organisations in contributing to multi-agency preparedness”.

Pinney said the official change led to further professionalisation of the MRA’s emergency response capability.

MRA has a 24/7 “hazard line” according to Pinney, which is “about public safety and subsidence”.

She said the line receives calls from people worried about subsidence in areas with former coal mines under their homes and gardens, as well as under roads, railways and farmland.

“We have people based across Great Britain, so we can respond rapidly,” she said. “We work very closely with emergency services and other partners, local authorities and others, to really provide support to anybody that’s affected.”

Pinney said the categorisation of the MRA as a category two emergency responder was partly due to “the increasingly important role that we play in instant response, not just in relation to smaller incidents, but also working with emergency services on some of the larger incidents that we’ve seen over the last five to 10 years.

“The big opportunity of being part of that structure means that fire and rescue services, the police, they can pick up the phone and get hold of you much more easily.

“We can provide training, support expertise, share information about risks and opportunities. We provide support on a range of things that aren’t directly coal mining related as well. But because we have that expertise, we can play that role to help keep other emergency responders safe.”

In addition to the new designation as a category two emergency response organisation, the MRA also increased its focus on opportunities, not just liabilities, in relation to coalfields. This change of emphasis in the organisation’s approach prompted a possibility to change its name.

Pinney said it’s something that “lots of customers, partners and colleagues have mentioned a number of times, so it’s been something that we’ve been thinking about for a whole.

“It was in our 10-year vision that was published in 2022; we thought changing our name would be the right thing to do. And since then, we’ve been taking a lot of soundings from people. Now feels like the right time to do it.”

Pinney confirmed that the new name does not come with new duties, rather it reflects changes which the organisation has undergone during the past 10 years.

Acting as a statutory consultee on developments

Pinney said the MRA works with Network Rail and others to try and “catch” concerns relating to historic mines before they cause incidents.

“We do a lot of work around permitting,” she said. “If anybody wants to do work on a coalfield, or for example, with some of the works around HS2, we are consulted.

She went on to say that for new developments, including new road and railways, the MRA “always tries and informs development to take place safely so that there wouldn’t be problems down the line”.

Commercial opportunities with the MRA

On the split of in-house versus contracted services, Pinney said the MRA works “with partners when we think that is the best way forward, or the best service or the best value for money.

“We have quite a big supply chain. A lot of our work that’s done on properties recovering from subsidence, we’ve worked with a wide range of SMEs and other suppliers across Great Britain to do that, and the management of mine water treatment scheme is outsourced.”

She confirmed that the contractor for mine water treatment schemes is currently Severn Trent Services.

Severn Trent Services fulfil the operations and maintenance contract, which according to Pinney is out for tender at the moment.

The impact of climate breakdown on the MRA’s work

The legacy of coal mining in Great Britain includes large visible assets that the MRA is aware of, but there are also sub-surface elements of coal mines dating back to at least as early as the 17th Century which the MRA is responsible for, but not necessarily aware of due to patchy record keeping.

Water and flooding play a big part in affecting the stability of many of its assets.

“I think all of us are seeing that extreme weather has more impact, largely because you’re seeing more rain in more the intense periods,” Pinney said. “That’s important to us in terms of how we design mine water treatment schemes, for example.

“All of our schemes handled more water last year than I think we’ve ever seen them do. They’re designed to take much higher flows, but, there are definitely years now where we’re seeing more intensity, and that hits us from a budget point of view as well, because it often means that we’re pumping more water.

“Anecdotally we would say that I think we are seeing, more significant incidents because that amount of water [leads to] more inspections that need to be done on tips.

“One of the most important things on tips is that water is well managed and able to be taken away. We always do re-inspections following extreme rainfall.”

On the Monday we spoke, Pinney said that MRA teams were out on site doing exactly that following the onslaught of Storm Bert over the preceding weekend.

Storm Bert was the second named storm of the 2024/2025 season and led to several deaths and considerable impacts on travel infrastructure.

“Any emergency responder would say that extreme weather and climate change adaptation is something that they take very seriously,” Pinney said.

Sending out professionals to check on the status of assets during or following intense weather events is a costly endeavour and puts those people in harm’s way.

Asset managers like Network Rail has already made a high-profile effort to invest in remote sensing for ground movement to detect landslips which increasingly affect the rail network.

Pinney said the MRA “already has quite a lot of remote sensing telemetry” and it is always looking for new technologies. At this moment the organisation is looking at “satellite capability” and the use of drones.”

Pinney said a lot of the MRA’s original records were hand-drawn by mining surveyors, but they were turned into PDFs during a digitalisation project 20 years ago.

“Our dream is to get to a point where that can be digitised using new technology into a point where there is a digital twin,” she said.

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