John Lamb
Ten years in the aviation sector saw John lead Highways & Transportation at Heathrow and Stansted. He responded to the collapse of the Heathrow Express rail construction and at Stansted lead key element of the Afghan Hijack and 747 Korean Air Freighter crash. Working across front line and strategic roles John innovative and customer focussed initiatives to sustainably manage impacts of aviation growth.
The last two decades John has led teams across County, Unitary, Mets and Boroughs. Born in Cumbria, but a having grown up in Sheffield, John has worked in all but one of the home counties surrounding London. Now living in the North West, John has worked at Trafford, Manchester and is currently supporting Oldham Council.
John is now parachuted into councils to swiftly support local communities across the entire placed based services of planning, highways, transportation and aaste management. As Chief Officer in Calderdale he witnessed first-hand the massive impact of the Boxing Day floods in 2015. Since then he has championed the need to better understand Resilience and Response across the Civil Resilience community.
The sector challenge – which John is now driving forward – is to unfreeze our thinking from traditional approach to resilience and instead how we mobilise for incidents that will be 20% worse than the 2015 flooding or even as high as 30% in some areas across the UK.
My Sessions at Cold Comfort
Wednesday 21 May 2025
PIARC: Disaster Management
- In an uncertain world, highways are already witnessing severe storms, floods and wildfires.
- Time and again our 200+ UK Highways Authorities step up to the challenge.
- The intensity and scale of extreme weather is now pushing highways to the limit and through UK best practice and global insight we must consider new ideas and fresh insight as to how we must respond to extreme weather.
- John Lamb is the UK representative on to the World Disaster Management Committee of PIARC, and Chair of UK RLG Board for Adaptation, Biodiversity and Climate
