IN Brief:
- Spencer Quantum has expanded its temporary roadway mat fleet after more than £5m of investment over three years.
- The business now holds around 12,000 mats, enough to create up to 15 miles of temporary roadway.
- Demand is being driven by renewables, water, highways, utilities, environmental work, and wetter site conditions.
Spencer Quantum has expanded its temporary roadway mat fleet as infrastructure projects, renewables work, water-sector investment, and wetter ground conditions increase demand for reliable site access.
The ground engineering and geotechnical specialist, part of RSK Group, has invested more than £5m in its mat fleet over the past three years. It now operates around 12,000 temporary access mats, enough to create up to 15 miles, or 24km, of temporary roadway.
The mats are being used across highways, utilities, renewables, environmental schemes, and major infrastructure work. Larger projects in the renewables and water sectors are creating particular demand, with prolonged wet conditions making access planning more difficult across exposed and undeveloped sites.
Temporary access is often categorised as enabling work, but it can quickly become programme-critical where heavy plant, cranes, welfare units, fuel bowsers, materials, and specialist contractors need to reach the workface safely. Poor access can damage ground, slow vehicle movements, increase recovery incidents, and add reinstatement costs at the end of the project.
These pressures are becoming more visible as infrastructure work spreads across rural, remote, soft, and environmentally sensitive locations. Solar farms, grid connections, pipelines, flood schemes, utilities upgrades, and water-sector projects often require access across land where permanent roads are unavailable, unwanted, or impractical.
Weather is adding uncertainty to that planning. Wetter winters and sustained periods of rain reduce bearing capacity, create rutting, and make vehicle movement less predictable. Even where a site remains technically accessible, slow haul routes and repeated ground repairs can undermine productivity across multiple work packages.
Temporary roadway systems also support environmental protection. By defining access routes and spreading loads, mats can reduce soil compaction, protect grassland, limit disturbance to agricultural land, and reduce damage to sensitive habitats or root zones. That control is increasingly important where planning conditions, landowner agreements, and environmental permits require strict management of site movement.
Infrastructure clients are placing greater emphasis on resilience across the enabling phase. Access, temporary power, drainage, welfare, haul routes, monitoring, and materials storage now require earlier planning because failure in any of those areas can disrupt the permanent works. A project cannot benefit from advanced plant, low-carbon materials, or digital site systems if vehicles cannot reliably reach the work area.
Renewable energy and grid projects are likely to keep that demand high. Solar farms need temporary routes for piling rigs, panels, inverters, transformers, substations, and maintenance access. Grid reinforcement requires movement of switchgear, cable drums, ducts, transformers, and cranes. Water-sector investment will bring plant and materials onto treatment works, pipelines, reservoirs, and remote assets.
Those sectors are also under pressure to reduce construction-phase carbon. Temporary access choices feed into that wider calculation because poor route planning can increase fuel use, vehicle idling, maintenance, ground remediation, and repeat visits. Low-carbon road work, including low-emission resurfacing activity on the M4 corridor, shows how plant, access, materials, and methodology are increasingly being considered together rather than as separate procurement decisions.
For contractors, mat specification involves more than choosing a hire item. Ground conditions, axle loads, turning areas, gradient, haul distance, expected traffic, drainage, cleaning, installation sequence, removal, reuse, and reinstatement all shape the system’s performance. A temporary pedestrian route, a crane support area, and an HGV haul road require different design assumptions.
Fleet size also affects resilience. Demand for temporary access can spike after storms, during key possession windows, or when several utilities and renewables projects enter construction at once. Spencer Quantum’s expanded stock gives the company more capacity to support long linear routes, multiple concurrent sites, and rapid mobilisation after weather-related disruption.
The investment underlines how construction resilience increasingly depends on the parts of delivery that are least visible once the permanent asset is complete. Before major plant can operate, materials can be installed, or civils work can progress, the site has to remain accessible. Temporary roadway systems are becoming a more deliberate part of project planning as weather, environmental control, and infrastructure demand converge.
