Water resources management plan

Water resources management plan

Our Water Resource Management Plan is a key component of our long-term, strategic planning framework. It sets out how we plan to maintain a safe and reliable water supply to customers over the long term.   

We produce a Water Resources Management Plan every 5 years taking into account the most up to date information on the future risks to water supply. Our regulators (Environment Agency, Ofwat and Drinking Water Inspectorate) set the requirements for what we should include in our plans and provide us with guidelines to follow. 

Our plan compares a long-term supply forecast against a long-term demand forecast. If it shows a risk that we may not have sufficient supply to meet demand in the future, we consider options for reducing demand and increasing supply. From the options we select a best value solution that will address the risks and be sustainable over the long-term.     

Our latest plan, Water Resources Management Plan 2024, has identified some significant risks to our future supply-demand balance. These risks include the impacts of climate change, population growth, reductions in supply to protect the environment and the loss of a water transfer we currently receive from a neighbouring water company.  Our plan shows, if we do not take action, these risks could create a supply-demand deficit. Our plan to mitigate the deficit includes a twin track approach that will deliver demand reduction and increase our available water supply.   

We published the draft version of our Water Resources Management Plan 2024 for consultation on 18 November 2022. The consultation period was 14 weeks and closed on 24 February 2023. We reviewed all the responses and made some key changes as a result. In September 2023 we published our Statement of Response which describes how our draft plan will be updated and improved based on the consultation feedback.   We resubmitted our draft plan to the regulators on 31 October 2023 for further feedback. We received a request for further information from Defra which we have addressed in the “Annex to our Statement of Response” document.