Faced with what could end up as the wettest April since records began, media coverage of the current drought, rain and floods in the UK suggests that the public are failing to get the message on water issues.
Much of the response from the public whether on TV, radio, online or hard-copy press always seems to elicit the same response to how the nation should conserve its increasingly constrained water supplies – which mostly boil down to the following - why should we pay more/ use less at a time when we’ve had huge amounts of rain and the water companies are losing billions of litres on a daily basis through leaks.
This may be a massive over-simplification – but last week’s ITV Tonight programme Is Britain running dry? highlighted attitudes currently prevalent in the British public which the water companies, the Government and water industry regulator Ofwat should be seriously considering how to tackle.
The message just doesn’t seem to be getting across that as a nation we waste huge amounts of water. The public also don’t seem to be aware of the costs involved and levels of ongoing investment needed to provide and maintain our 21st century water and sewerage infrastructure.
The Ofwat website might well state that the water companies manage a network of 335,000 km of pipes, that leakage levels across England and Wales leakage levels have reduced by more than a third since the mid-1990s and that even by replacing all the pipes in England and Wales at a cost of around £100 billion it would still only succeed in halving current leakage levels. However, while the sector, the Government and the water companies understand the implications of the Economic Level of Leakage most of this is simply lost on the British public. They might want leakage to be reduced – but they’re not expecting to pay for it.
Therein lies a significant challenge – not least for the water companies who are gearing themselves up for extensive consultations and stakeholder engagement on their upcoming Business Plans for the AMP6 2015-20 investment programme.
How will they be able to take these issues into account when they set out their proposals, confident in the knowledge that stakeholders have reached a sufficient level of knowledge and understanding to make informed judgements and decisions?
The water industry regulator is currently still formulating its thinking on the issue and has not provided a prescriptive approach to the water companies. Given the regulator’s preference for comparators in the industry to benchmark performance, how will Ofwat monitor individual approaches on a company-by-company basis? What will happen in the event of Ofwat deeming a consultation process judged as satisfactory by a water company and its customer engagement panel to be inadequate? And what level of information will Ofwat be prepared to publish on the detail?
It will be interesting to see whether the Government’s upcoming draft Water Bill takes a more joined-up approach on how to communicate on these key issues with the wider public.