Five UK water sector priorities this sector can deliver in five years

Stop river and sea pollution

This is the big one. Pollution has been a massive area of public concern long before it became an election issue. It is one the water sector will be judged on. The new Secretary of State in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has emphasised this, saying: “We will never look the other way while water companies pump sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas”. Ofwat has allowed £10 billion to reduce spills from storm overflows, which it expects will result in 44% fewer spills between 2021 and 2029. This must be achieved as a minimum.

As the water sector advances solutions to reduce overflows, an inescapable fact remains that, when it rains, the water needs somewhere to go. The approaching housing and building boom also means that overflows must be considered in relation to urban development. It is critical that all new properties have a strict separation of storm and foul, even if built on the ‘grey’ belt with potentially existing infrastructure. I hope the government will immediately implement Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 to mainstream sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) and then adopt a ‘sponge cities’ principle within any planning reforms.

Change the public’s relationship with water

It is estimated that the UK will need an extra 4–5 billion litres per day by 2050 to prevent regular water shortages. That will need to be achieved through a combination of new resources and reduced demand.

There will be nine new reservoirs, seven new large-scale water transfer projects and 12 new water recycling plants to get water where it is needed and reduce the requirement for further abstraction in times of drought. This will go long into the future beyond AMP8 and is critical to secure the extra supplies required. A further 13% reduction in leakage is expected, and the sector needs to continue to invest in sensors and artificial intelligence to achieve those numbers, which I am confident we can do.

We also need to consider how we engage with the public on water demand. We cannot fix the water and environmental challenges without involving the public. It is time for the water sector to mobilise customers.

In England and Wales, the current per capita consumption is about 140 litres per person per day and has remained stubbornly high for the past decade. We need to reduce this figure to 100 litres and even lower for new builds. I thought it was quite instructive that one of the first meetings the new Defra Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Emma Hardy MP, held was with Waterwise to discuss water efficiency, which will be a key government target over the coming cycle. This is extremely good news for those of us who wish to see both demand and supply being given equal emphasis. Let’s hope Defra embraces the Waterwise UK water efficiency strategy to 2030 in full.

Build resilience to climate change

Floods and drought have been a consistent feature of our weather in recent years and one we cannot ignore. We need to give more attention to flood prevention and management strategies, even as we invest in supply-side measures as part of drought management plans. We need to embrace a wider systems-based process to develop sustainable solutions for future generations.

The current silver bullet is ‘nature-based solutions’. Ofwat had allocated £2 billion to these schemes, and the industry needs to evolve quickly from one based on hard solutions – pumps, pipes and concrete – to a softer, greener future. This is not an easy transition because we have spent 150 years taking water away from urban environments to protect properties from flooding and pollution. Now we need the public to embrace the concept of living with water. If we wish to embrace green solutions, procurement rules will need to change to buy the plants required up to two years before they are needed in any scheme – aquatic plants need time to grow and mature before planting.

However, a word of warning: in order to unlock progress in this field, regulatory adjustments will need to emphasise average seasonal performance rather than absolute compliance with every sample taken irrespective of local conditions. The Environment Agency will have a key role to play in developing new standards.

Embrace net zero

The UK has a policy to hit net zero by 2050, and the water sector was one of the first out of the blocks in February 2020, publishing a roadmap to hit net zero operational emissions by 2030. This was followed, almost immediately, by the first COVID lockdown!

Nevertheless, the industry has made good progress. Ofwat did not place a great deal of emphasis on carbon reduction in the draft determination, other than an expected 11% emissions reduction during the next five years and some encouraging words about creating woodlands and restoring peatlands. There is a requirement for companies to properly measure ‘embedded’ carbon from asset creation, which is necessary for the sector to be carbon neutral by 2050. This is helpful because the embedded carbon was always going to be more difficult to eliminate than the operational stuff.

Of course, the drive to nature-based solutions represents its own carbon reduction journey. It may be interpreted that the absence of specific carbon initiatives demonstrates that this emphasis should be regarded as business as usual. Perhaps in AMP9 or AMP10, Ofwat will be looking at a zero concrete determination where all assets will need to be nature based and penalties are imposed for any concrete poured.

Turbocharge R&D to start to deal with some big problems coming down the track

The presence of microplastics, pharmaceuticals and other persistent organic pollutants in our environment presents a significant challenge for our treatment plants, creating new compliance issues. The activated sludge process was developed over 100 years ago to treat pollution from faecal solids and is very good at cleaning the liquid stream but is energy intensive and emits greenhouse gases. We must develop new processes to tackle these challenges and build 21st century solutions.

Biosolids are treated by anaerobic digestion to create a product that is safe and acceptable for use in agriculture. In England and Wales, we produce approximately 3.5 million tonnes of digested biosolids each year. Although beneficial as a phosphate and nitrate source for the soil, the biosolids contain microplastics and other chemicals that will be a challenge for the agricultural outlet. It is certain that the practice of biosolids spreading will be severely curtailed in future, and the industry needs to start planning for this now. We need new processes to reduce the volume and sequester the carbon to be developed, trialled at scale and ready to roll out.

We have a proud record of solving big problems through research and innovation, and Ofwat has recognised this by doubling the size of the Innovation Fund to £400 million. In AMP7, the fund is now beginning to bear fruit, after a slow start, with over 90 programmes set to empower the sector’s efforts. The supply chain has always stood ready to support innovative approaches, and, again, we need to be brave when adopting new technologies. Innovating in a highly regulated sector, while more difficult and slow, is possible when everyone is engaged on the target. I hope that AMP8 will be the period when innovation is genuinely put back at the heart of the water sector and we start leading the world again.

Finally, we need to attract talent because no matter how impressive our innovation and tech is, we can’t achieve our goals if we ignore the human factor, and the skills shortage is becoming critical. We have to ensure we are attracting the next generation and being very clear about how a career in water can make a huge difference to our communities and our planet. Until then, the sector needs to come together in a way that maximises our supply chain rather than creating unhelpful and counterproductive competition.

Over the coming months, there will be lots of talk about whether the water companies will appeal or what the final determination will be, but I think, from a sector point of view, we need to come to terms with the fact that we will have to deliver a five-year programme almost twice as big as anything we have delivered before.

There are huge risks to being able to do this, in particular with limited engineering design capacity, technology availability and procurement of nature-based solutions to name a few. However, in contrast, what other sector can have such an impact on society as ours can? We have the opportunity to enhance and secure our environment for future generations, and now with the draft determination, we have the funding to begin the task. What a time to be in the water sector.