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The water regulator has highlighted areas in regional water resource management plans in need of development including around demand management.
Ofwat criticised water companies’ draft plans for not considering a wider range of options for drought planning. It instructed water companies and regional groups to develop “new and innovative options” to demonstrate why their proposals were chosen. It said some companies’ individual water resource management plans (WRMPs) included “notably high unit costs”, which the regulator said indicated insufficient model options for decision making.
The regulator noted that draft plans – published in November 2022, and February 2023 for WCWR – had “moved on significantly” from the emerging plans previously published. However, it expressed unease that issues it previously highlighted have yet to be addressed within all of the regional plans.
Ofwat said the plans at this stage lacked sufficient testing or explanation for achieving one in 500 year drought resilience and called for more exploration of trade-offs around pathways to regional scale drought resilience.
Plans submitted by the five regional water resource management groups – North, South East, East, West, and West Country – required work to identify and costs and benefits of various timescales for readiness for the notional drought.
It underlined that all companies, working as part of the regional groups, were expected to reduce water demand to alleviate pressures on supply as well as to cut leakage in half by 2050. Ofwat said there were “some exceptions that cause concern” to the overall move towards achieving these targets.
“We are still seeing a lack of robust and tailored glidepaths to meet those targets and our concerns remain around the deliverability of demand management strategies,” Ofwat said in a letter to West Country Water Resources. “Without robust testing and tailoring of demand management strategies within and between companies we cannot be confident we are seeing optimal proposals.”
It called on the regional groups to set out ambitious strategies for non-household demand management in the final WRMPs and to see companies deliver on commitments made at PR19 and WRMPs from 2019.
This is the first time joined up regional plans have been created. They are intended to give a bigger picture of water resources in different regions and how neighbouring areas interact. Water resource management plans will be taken into account by Ofwat when assessing companies’ business plans for 2025-30.
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