Water Resources Management Plan

Explaining our Water Resources Management Plan.

A statutory requirement

It is a statutory requirement that every five years water companies produce and publish a Water Resources Management Plan (WRMP).

The WRMP should demonstrate that we have long-term plans in place to accommodate the impacts of population growth, drought, our environmental obligations and climate change uncertainty in order to balance supply and demand.

It consists of several elements.

How the plan is made

Consider environmental impacts

Statutory timetable for WRMP

Consider affordability for customers

Consult with stakeholders

Future challenges

Our Water Resources Management Plan must demonstrate

  • Resilience to a range of risks – e.g. drought, loss of supplies.
  • Flexibility and adaptability – the plan must be robust to changes to supply and demand forecasts in the future.
  • Approach to climate change – drier summers and wetter winters make it harder to meet peak demand.
  • Sustainable abstraction options – which don’t deplete our natural resources or have a negative effect on biodiversity and our local river environment.
  • Planned proactive work – proactive maintenance of our network to reduce amount of water wasted by leakage and optimise the use of our sources.

draft Water Resource Management Plan 2024

We published the draft version of our next Water Resources Management Plan (dWRMP24) on 16 November 2022.  This latest plan looks ahead to what we plan to do between 2025 and 2085.

We then held a 14 week consultation period, which ended on 22 February 2023 and we had an incredible 394 comments from various organisations on the content of the plan.

In June 2023 we published our Statement of Response, which responded to each and every one of those comments and shows how our plan will be updated and improved based on the feedback.

We then updated our draft plan and resubmitted that to our regulators who again gave us comments and suggestions.  Below you will find our second Statement of Response which details how we have responded to those additional comments.

Our next step is to create a final plan which incorporates all of the feedback we have received and we aim to publish this, subject to approval, in the Summer of 2024.

Market information

We provide Water Resources Market information to enable third parties to identify where we may need additional water resources and to test how their proposals compare to our own supply options.

This map shows where our fifteen water resource zones (WRZ) are located.

You can download a spreadsheet containing key market information and data on our water resources position for each zone, and a Shapefile that can be used in Geographic Information Systems to depict our water resource zone boundaries.

Water resource marketing information

Water resource zones Market information tables WRZ maps
Bishops Castle
 Excel spreadsheet Shapefile
Chester Excel spreadsheet Shapefile
Forest and Stroud Excel spreadsheet Shapefile
Kinsall Excel spreadsheet Shapefile
Mardy Excel spreadsheet Shapefile
Newark Excel spreadsheet Shapefile
North Staffs
 Excel spreadsheet Shapefile

If you would like clarification of any of the information contained in the spreadsheets, please get in touch with the team by emailing futureconsultation@severntrent.co.uk or check our trading and procurement code.

Bid assessment framework

The purpose of this Bid Assessment Framework is to support the market for water resources, demand management and leakage services.

It provides guidance and a template to enable you to submit proposals to help us maintain our water supply balance.

This process is designed to ensure transparency and fairness throughout the tendering process and builds on existing processes and our obligations for water resource planning, procurement law and competition obligations.

The BAF was introduced to encourage competitive bidding market for water resources, demand management and leakage so that we will adopt the best value options regardless of their origin.

This way we will ensure our customers have the lowest possible bills.

We’re happy to receive proposals from all organisations.

All these proposals will be subject to a straightforward and transparent pre-qualification evaluation. 

We run an annual cycle to generate bids but we are more than happy to accept ad-hoc or speculative submissions at any time.

We will ensure confidentiality in two ways.

  1. We are happy to enter into a non-disclosure agreement.
  2. We have a separate team that will assess your proposal. Those developing water resource schemes, demand management and leakage services will not have access to your ideas or intellectual property.

Get in touch with us if you have any questions or feedback

If you have queries on any part of the process, or want to discuss technical aspects of your proposal, please get in touch by emailing our team at BAFProcurement@severntrent.co.uk.