‘Cobbled together’ water neutrality scheme lacks strategic thought, experts warn

The “cobbled together” water neutrality scheme for Cambridge does not take water scarcity seriously, industry experts have told Utility Week.

The scheme – unveiled by the Department for levelling up, housing and communities (DLUHC) – has been devised to address water scarcity concerns which had put the brakes on homebuilding in the area.

DLUHC secretary Michael Gove pledged last year to add 150,000 homes in the city, however the Environment Agency has already blocked 9,000 proposed houses due to insufficient water resources.

Water strategy consultant, and founder of the Water Retail Company, Jacob Tompkins told Utility Week that the scheme has not been properly thought out.

“Michael Gove decided Cambridge is going to be a growth area, when concerns for water were raised they just cobbled together something saying they would sort it out. But they haven’t thought strategically,” the former managing director of Waterwise said.

“Water doesn’t feature in any of the thinking, and it’s a semi-arid area.”

Tompkins said the scheme for Cambridge is reflective of the government’s lack of joined up thinking on water resources.

He said the country needs a strategic and joined up water strategy and described the Plan for Water published by the Environment department (Defra) last year as lacking in both.

“They’re just going through the motions. Water does not feature at all in the government’s thinking, and when it does it’s an afterthought,” he added.

The DLUHC announcement included a water credit system which would allow developers to offset the water consumption of new homes by buying credits to have a neutral impact on overall resources in the area.

This, government said, would be a way for developments to progress through the planning process while minimising environmental risks.

Tompkins said water neutrality is a great idea, but one that requires “more money, more strategy and better thinking” to get right.

DLUHC pledged £4.5 million to get water efficient retrofits into homes to kick off its proposed credits scheme, which couldn’t be described as paltry, but compared to money being spent on supply-side options it pails into insignificance – a point routinely raised by consumer group CCW.

In PR24 business plan proposals submitted to Ofwat for 2025-30, the level of investment outlined for water efficiency and demand management including behavioural change is – across the industry – drastically lower than for supply infrastructure. There will be a dedicated £100 million fund to accelerate innovation and roll out schemes to help domestic customers and businesses use less, however Ofwat admitted this was an insufficient amount. 

Utility Week understands non-household market operator MOSL has been sounded out to run the credits market and match up buyers and sellers of water credits. Credits will initially be created through retrofits of water efficient devices to existing properties to lower the building’s consumption, funded to the tune of £4.5 million by government.

Speaking more positively about the proposals for Cambridge, Waterwise’s head of policy Nathan Richardson said the pace of work spurred by the homebuilding ambition was encouraging to see.

However, he has reservations that the smart metering infrastructure, which is essential for gathering consumption data, will be rolled out across the city rapidly enough.

“What’s happening in Cambridge is bringing a lot of issues to a head, which is making the government and other stakeholders look seriously at things like water reuse, dual pipes and offsetting,” he said.

He said the work resulting from this – which includes numerous water saving pilot schemes – will have a lot of value for other water stressed areas.

However, Richardson pointed out that with many parts of the country classified as water-stressed, these actions should have been taken anyway.

“It’s taken this situation to emerge in Cambridge to get these things kickstarted,” he said.

Water companies produce statutory water resource plans every five years with forecasts for future supplies and mitigations the company will take. For the first time, non-statutory joined-up, regional plans have also been made in collaboration with numerous stakeholders to include multi-sector water requirements and the interplay between areas.

The crisis in Cambridge has occurred despite all that work, Richardson said and described it as “a red flag for our planning system.”

“We’re spending huge amounts of money on water resources planning nationally, regionally and at company-level,” he said. “So you should never have a situation where there just isn’t the water available for the growth being planned. There’s a gap between land-use and water planning, we need to avoid that in the future.”

This is not the first time water neutrality has been explored. Tompkins is involved with the north Sussex project to balance supply and demand in and around Horsham. He warned it was important to make offsetting definitions clear to avoid loopholes and guarantee water savings in perpetuity.

“When they talk about offsets, some of them are not water savings, they’re drilling into boreholes,” Thompkins said. “Cambridge could become peppered with small boreholes below the de minimis levels, so they don’t need to be registered or have a licence, but they’re still taking water from the same aquifer. That’s not offsetting.”