Update on our water resources planning
Posted: 17 December 2024
A breakdown of the review of our Water Resources Management Plan following a letter from our regulators.
Earlier this year, we submitted an annual review of our Water Resources Management Plan (WRMP) – a plan we create every five years, which sets out how we will provide a high-quality, secure and reliable water supply affordably and sustainably over the next 25 years.
It is important we have this plan in place as we face several challenges to continue to provide high-quality drinking water to customers. These include a growing population and climate change.
Our annual reviewThis review was carried out against the plan we submitted in 2019 and is a report of our performance against a set of metrics set out in our plan.
The review aims to understand whether we would have been able to supply our customers with water should we experience the rare occurrence of a 1 in 200-year drought.
It outlines whether we are exceeding, meeting or lagging on performance as expected when our WRMP was published.
It also covers the conditions of the year past, reflecting on anything that may have been unforeseen such as weather impacts, like drought, or any operation issues.
What the review foundIn 2023-24, we reported a negative supply-demand balance in our water resource zones.
A negative supply-demand balance indicates that if we had performed in the same way during a 1 in 200-year drought, we would have struggled to maintain water supply.
Whilst this may seem alarming, had a severe drought occurred, our plans would have been adjusted to ensure that demand was met. This was demonstrated in 2022, when we postponed planned outages (work carried out on our network leaving water supply unavailable) to ensure customer supplies were not jeopardised during that summer’s drought.
In October 2024, our regulators, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, wrote to us to request further information about our performance and what actions we would be taking.
Below is a summary of the concerns highlighted and our response:
- Leakage greater than forecast – leakage in our region is at its lowest-ever level. We have realigned our leakage baseline in our new WRMP so that it’s consistent with Ofwat’s Performance Commitment monitoring.
- Per capita consumption greater than forecast – since the pandemic, many customers’ working patterns have changed, causing a change in forecasted usage. Starting in 2025 - as proposed in our next five-year business plan - we will be working on a rollout of universal metering so that we can work with customers to review their consumption and look at ways water can be saved at home.
- Metering levels are behind forecast - we have created an action plan to close this gap over the next few years. This can be found in our full response to the joint regulatory letter linked below.
- Outage greater than planned - this was driven by our proactive response to delaying planned outages during the drought in 2022, which we then caught up in 2023.
Our full response to the joint regulatory letter can be viewed here.
What we are doing to improveMuch has changed since we prepared our Water Resources Management Plan in 2019.
In 2024, the regulatory and policy baselines were altered, and targets, assumptions and commitments moved on.
Our Water Resources Management Plan 2024 (WRMP24) reflects these changes and takes into account the actions and investment proposals set out in our business plan submission to Ofwat.
Our proposed programme of work for the South Staffs Water supply area focuses on managing water demand.
Our delivery aims include:
- A 9% reduction in non-household water use by 2038
- Household water use of 110 litres per person per day by 2050 – down by 30 litres
- Universal smart metering for all our customers
Our engagement with customers shows that they prefer a plan that focuses on reducing water demand. There is also majority support for universal metering.
However, our research also suggests that we need to make sure appropriate support mechanisms are in place to protect vulnerable customers and large families.
So that we can do this, we:
- will expand our existing Assure water billing tariff to support nearly twice as many customers
- will provide a two-year grace period for meter rollout. Customers will have two years from the date of meter installation before we switch to metered billing so we can provide them with regular consumption and proposed bill data
To find out more about our Water Resources Management Plans and to learn how we are using your bills to secure your water future, click here.