Planning for providing water

We must ensure secure supplies of high quality water, as expected by our customers. At the same time, we must take local environmental conditions into account and plan for the long term, including the effects of climate change. This requires detailed water resource planning.

The last 12 months have been important in the water resources and business planning cycles. We have:

• published the water resources management plan for consultation – to cover 2010 to 2035
• discussed the plan with our stakeholders and encouraged them to send comments to Defra
• received and reviewed comments from 14 stakeholder groups and individuals with a range of interests.

Why have we produced a water resource management plan?

We have a statutory duty to prepare and maintain a water resources management plan. This is to show our regulators, customers and stakeholders how we intend to provide enough water and protect the environment over the next 25 years.

So how did we go about preparing our plan?

Planning for our future water resources means building detailed projections of future water demand.

This meant taking into account:

• population growth
• housing developments
• changing patterns of household water use
• changing demands from our commercial customers.

Future availability of water resources

This involved looking at potential changes to the quantity of water we could obtain from our water sources, such as:

• abstraction licence reductions requested by the EA to improve low river flows
• assessing the potential impacts of climate change.

Comparing these two areas of forecasts showed enough water resources in our south and west areas, but some deficits in the north and east of our region due to abstraction licence reductions and population growth.

So what happens in areas where there may not be enough water in the future?

We have looked at a range of options to resolve the imbalance between supply and demand. These included:

• demand management options – eg, leakage reduction or water efficiency
• supply options – eg, new resource development or infrastructure improvements.

We also carried out a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) to help us consider the potential social and environmental impacts of proposed options when making decisions for our plan for the future.