Our customers expect water to be there when they need it, and it’s important to them that they can trust a clean, healthy supply of water that will always be there when they turn on the tap. Water management is the whole end to end process.
That means ensuring abstraction is sustainable, investing in our network and maintaining it, managing our own water use and enabling and encouraging customers to manage theirs.
Water resource management plans
Our statutory Water Resource Management Plans detail how we will manage supply and demand to adapt to the impact of climate change and meet our environmental obligations over the next 25 years, in both Severn Trent and Hafren Dyfrdwy.
We produce and publish a Water Resource Management Plan every five years, and conduct an annual review. We will published our latest Water Resources Management Plan in summer 2024. This latest plan looks ahead to what we plan to do between 2025 and 2085.
Our Water Resource Management Plan consists of several elements:
Climate projection modelling
Our Water Resource Management Plan takes into account the potential long term impacts, and the significant uncertainties around those impacts, of climate change on our water resources.
We use the UK Climate Projection 2018 datasets and combine them with our own water resource modelling capability to produce a range of plausible, climate-impacted future scenarios.
We have tested the impact of the full range of those scenarios on our investment decision making, and have produced a plan that takes a proportionate approach to mitigating for this future uncertainty.
We are now assessing the impact of the UK Climate Projection 2018 scenarios.
Our long term water management strategy
Our long term strategy consists of two main elements. Firstly, we’ll use demand management measures to reduce the amount of water we need to put into supply. To achieve this we will:
Secondly, we’ll make the best use of our sustainable sources of supply. To do this we will:
Our Water Resource Management Plan and our Price Review 2024 investment plan include 7 supply scheme options for delivery in AMP8 which involve making better use of existing sustainable sources of supply and enhancing our ability to deploy the water.
These are needed to meet the environmental challenges in reducing unsustainable abstraction and mitigating future environmental deterioration.
We worked with a wide range of stakeholders throughout the production of the Water Resource Management Plan.
Through stakeholder forums, formal consultations, customer engagement workshops and one-to-one meetings, feedback from stakeholders have helped to shape our view of options for our plan.
Clear messages that we addressed in our final plan include; more ambitious leakage targets and demand management thinking and continue to deliver on our environmental commitments.
We have a wider responsibility to ensure that future resources are planned and delivered most efficiently within our wider region and within England.
We have played an active role in helping to meet these objectives by collaborating with other water companies to develop water trades. We’ve worked with Thames Water and United Utilities on the Severn to Thames Transfer and with Affinity Water on the Grand Union Canal transfer scheme.
We are also actively developing regional multisector water resource planning within England. We’ve partnered with stakeholders from across the region and have become core members of the Water Resources West.
We describe how we manage our resources and supply system in dry years to maintain our service to customers in our Drought Plan.
Our drought assessment concludes that through the actions we have taken in the past, our raw water supplies are already resilient to a one in 200 year drought event. We update our plan every five years.
Restoring sustainable abstraction
Some of our existing water abstractions may be having a detrimental effect on the environment, particularly during dry weather periods when river flows are low.
Throughout 2015 to 2025, we have investigated the impact of abstractions that the Environment Agency identified as possibly harmful to the environment.
We’re gathering evidence of any damage to find out whether our activities are the main cause or just a contributor to any problem, and implementing solutions where necessary.
Leakage
Tackling leakage is one of our top priorities. We’re already driving down our leakage figures and we’ve committed to reduce leakage by a further 15% by 2030.
We’ll prioritise leakage in the areas of greatest demand in Asset Management Period 8 - from 2025 to 2030.
Our goal is to reduce leakage by 50% by 2045. We plan to achieve this through mains renewal, developing and deploying leakage detection and prevention technology, improving measurement and data capture, and innovation.
Water efficiency
We have an ambitious water efficiency programme that has saved around 18.98 million litres per day (Ml/d) of water between 2020 and 2024 through water efficiency advice for customers, free and subsidised water-saving products on request, and targeted home water efficiency checks.
We’re working in partnership with Save Water Save Money to offer our customers various water-saving devices, which help them save water and save money by reducing their water bill. The products are free, or offered at a reduced price. We generate no income from these products.
Our target over AMP7 is to deliver 35,000 home audits every year, helping our customers to make the best use of water efficiency devices in their homes. In 2019/20, we completed over 23,000 home audits, allowing customers to save on average 10% on their daily water use.
We have also gained better insights into the causes of leaks on customers’ private supply pipes and fixtures. In 2020/21, the home efficiency programme has been impacted by lockdown restrictions. We carried out just under 12,000 virtual and physical home water efficiency checks. In 22/23 our bounce back from lockdown restrictions meant we were able to carry out 19,803 home water efficiency checks.
We believe metering is essential in reducing water consumption. We aim to have 65% of households on a water meter by 2025, with full metering coverage by the end of Asset Management Period 9 in 2035. We are unable to compulsory switch customers to a meter so, between 2020 and 2025, we will install meters proactively and offer customers the opportunity to switch after demonstrating to them what their measured bill would be.
We expect this to give us a 10 Megalitre per day saving in Asset Management Period 7. Increased metering will make it easier to detect leaks, and give improvements in leak detection and repair, helping achieve our leakage reduction target.
| Water management data | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | 2023/24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leakage (megalitres per day) | 429.9 | 411.1 | 415.61 | 379.48 |
| Meters installed | 83,274 | 110,100 | 100,108 | 111,853 |