Water UK is calling on the government to take immediate action to strengthen water sector resilience - the call comes in its written response to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee’s Call for Evidence on climate adaptation and resilience.

The trade body which represents all of the water and wastewater companies across Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has set out its Priorities for Resilience in a series of actions with immediate, medium and long term impacts which are needed to build the public water supply and wastewater treatment system’s resilience to climate change.

According to Water UK:

“If undertaken, these actions would immediately provide more water, droughts would be managed more effectively when they do occur, and water companies could deliver vital new infrastructure required for climate resilience faster.”

Water UK is calling for the following actions that would deliver:

IMMEDIATE IMPACT

Dynamic Abstraction: Caps on daily and annual volumes of water that water companies are allowed to take from the environment should be removed at times when river flows are very high. It would provide much needed more water and reduce the risk of flooding.

Groundwater abstraction: Allow groundwater abstraction in areas at risk of ‘groundwater rebound’ (ground water flooding).

Review past abstraction reductions: Assess the environmental impact of past reductions in the volume of water taken from the environment to understand if they have delivered any environmental improvement and, where they have not, recommissioning these sources to boost resilience in the short term.

MEDIUM TERM IMPACT

Reform drought management: Companies develop drought plans – operational plans for managing a drought – every five years and these are signed off by the Secretary of State for the Environment. These plans include identifying places where a water company would take additional water from the environment in the event of a drought and agreements to continually monitor the environmental condition of those sites to ensure the abstraction remains appropriate. However, in a drought situation, water companies have to reapply for already agreed drought permits and orders, delaying their critical operational response to drought. Drought permits and orders should be decided once, when the Secretary of State signs off a drought plan.

Drought hierarchy: The UK Government should set out a hierarchy of water users in a drought. It should not be left to water companies to make inherently political decisions on priorities during an emergency situation.

Extend permitted development rights: Many water infrastructure developments require planning consent but should not be in the planning system at all. Extending permitted development rights would free up planners’ resources at no additional cost to the taxpayer and no adverse impact on people or the environment.

Grant water infrastructure Special Development Orders: Instead of costly and time-consuming Development Consent Orders for major new water infrastructure such as new reservoirs, the government should grant planning permission for water schemes using Special Development Orders. It was done for Universal Studios and, instead of taking two years, the process took six months. If it’s good enough for a theme park, it seems good enough for a reservoir.

Require planning authorities to take decisions, not defer them: When considering planning applications, rather than accede to the requests by the Environment Agency or Natural England for more assessment, planning authorities should be required to make judgments on the available evidence, unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Exclude minor works from Environmental Impact Assessment: and, where relevant, licenses by reducing the need for permits and licenses. To reduce the number of situations in which an abstraction license or flood risk activity permits are required.

Minor developments, below one hectare, are exempt from Environmental Impact Assessments. This threshold should be increased to cover a higher proportion of small developments, including those already on water companies’ sites.

Accelerate the replacement of Environmental Impact Assessments with Environmental Outcome Reports: The Government has promised to act by the end of 2027, but we see no reason to wait.

LONG TERM IMPACT 

Planning for water availability based on forecast future demand, not targets: Water companies are required to plan on the hope that people will use less water in future. If people do not reduce their consumption as much as the government would like them to, the gap between demand for water and available supply will increase. Hosepipe bans and additional restrictions will become more likely. The building of even more houses will be held up than already are. Even more businesses will be unable to expand for no other reason than a lack of water. Water companies should be enabled to plan on the basis of reasonable forecasts for future water demand, and not on the basis of overly ambitious targets.

Resilience standards: The UK Government has already set a standard for the water industry to prepare for a severe drought (a 1 in 500 year event) moving from the historic planning assumption of a ‘worst historic drought’ (approximately a 1 in 100 year event based on past climate records). However, resilience standards are needed to set out how much capacity is required in the network to handle peak demand events such as heat waves and how much redundancy is required to mitigate the impact of other climate shocks such as the flooding of water industry assets.

To enable innovative Catchment and Nature-based Solutions: we need integrated planning and decision-making, alongside flexible statutory obligations and regulations to deliver benefits to water quality, quantity and drainage. Such approaches would also deliver wider benefits such as flood protection, biodiversity and carbon reduction.

Implement the Nuclear Regulatory Review: As set out in Water UK’s report on barriers to project delivery, government should speed up the delivery of major new water infrastructure by implementing the reforms recommended by the government’s Nuclear Regulatory Review. These include adjusting the cost caps for judicial review to reduce the risk of spurious legal challenges, and enabling major projects to comply with the Habitats Regulations protections through offsite compensation for environmental impacts.

“Need for early investment is imperative in face of climate change"

The response concludes:

“While this response focusses on specific issues relating to the water sector, Water UK wants to emphasise the outsized impacts climate change has on water supplies. Water is on the front line of climate change, and water companies among the main actors fighting to secure the resilience of our economy.

“The need for early investment is imperative in the face of climate change, as is the need for co-ordination across sectors and regions to ensure that investment is effective. That co-ordination needs clear signals from government as to its priorities, and robust institutions that can carry that vision forward.”

Click here to download the response in full