A Fresh Water Future is possible

We need a fresh water future. At the parliamentary launch, Alastair Chisholm told a packed audience why and how.


Over the course of this work we spoke to a lot of people – getting on for 5000 in all, across public, practitioners and stakeholders. We heard lots of different perspectives. That was the plan.

But what was clear in all that is that the majority of people we spoke to felt that the health and resilience of our waters is declining. Moreover, they think we’re flying semi-blind to what’s really happening, where.

They don’t believe those statements too easily trotted out that rivers are in better health than they’ve been since the industrial revolution.

And they’re sick of the blinkered mindset that presents taking care of our environment as a brake on development. Water should never be reduced to an administrative inconvenience for development.

Simplistic arguments abound on water. You just have to look at the recent flooding: Black-and-white solutions. Rewild. Dredge. Drain. Build bigger walls. Don’t build on flood plains. Build on stilts.

In the water industry there you still don’t need to scratch too deep to find an oft-cited view that if it’s raining hard, sewage doesn’t really matter. Dilution will deal with it. It’s just the way our system was built and works.

In farming, that farmers know their land and what it needs best. And always will.

Things that may have worked or been tolerated once aren’t necessarily the same today. And the public’s value set is shifting on these things too.

They want better.

Pressures need change

Our water cycle has got a whole lot more pressured in recent decades.

Abstraction, wastewater pollution, agricultural runoff, urbanisation, chemicals, plastics, toxic road runoff. Through more diffuse and complex sources and pathways. Oh, and then there’s climate change!

The public get all this. They see it in more houses, more traffic, more congestion, more litter in their river corridors, more floods and extreme weather. Less birds, less fish when they walk their dog or their child by their local river. They know things aren’t well. And they’re worried about that.

In response to the recent flooding many people have asked: Do we need to think differently? Do we need a new way? Is this a new normal?

Similar questions came after the drought a couple of summers ago, because of its intensity and the speed it came on.

The answer of course is yes. We do.

Unless we think of our towns differently, our landscapes differently, and get smarter about nurturing natural processes and services, alongside building and the other things we need to live, these problems will ramp up alarmingly quickly.

In fairness to the government, its Plan for Water points to this.

It got quite a lot of criticism when it was published. But that was largely because people wanted to see decisive action rather than words – in another plan – shortly after its Environmental Improvement Plan was published.

And, yes, government has instigated action. Requirements in the Environment Act and harder-line regulation has instigated a near-£100 billion pitch by water companies to improve their performance and compliance.

And that’s just the start of what the industry says will be needed over the next few AMP rounds.

Huge amounts of money are going to have to be spent in coming years. It’s probably fair to say that hasn’t registered with the public. Certainly few of those we spoke to expected major increases in their bills.

Which brings me to value for money.

Widely, practitioners think we’re not necessarily spending money in the areas that will deliver the biggest improvements in river health and resilience. If that is what we want to achieve.

They think we’re not using money efficiently. Because despite some movement in the right direction, funding pots and rules remain too siloed and rigid. Still too often driving single compliance actions, not multiple benefit outcomes.

“Many people have asked: Do we need to think differently? Do we need a new way? Is this a new normal? The answer of course is yes. We do.”

Launching A Fresh Water Future with The Rt Hon Philip Dunne MP and steering group chair, Michelle Ashford
Action

So as all of these pressures increase – the challenges grow – they need a proportionate response.

And yet.

We’ve seen a Code for Sustainable Homes that would have progressively driven impressive levels of water efficiency in new development scrapped getting on for a decade ago. And now water resource problems are hampering government’s growth ambitions around Cambridge.

We see Farming Rules for Water not enforced for years. And nutrient neutrality becoming an widening frustration on housebuilding targets.

We see sustainable drainage legislation dating back to 2010 still not applied in 2024: Something which could have helped usher in good practice, mitigate growing pressure on combined sewers, help tackle surface water flooding – and more.

People consistently pointed out that water management – because it is often so dependent on major infrastructure – plays out over decades. And given the state of our rivers we don’t have any more decades to dither, to u-turn, to delay, to pay lip-service.

What we’re witnessing now is the result of water complacency over the past decade – and more – coming back to bite us. This, is what people told us.

We need the next government – whoever they may be – to deliver a fresh water future.

And so…

Regulation

After 30 years of privatised water, agricultural intensification, climate change, light touch regulation, and policy drift: A full, independent review of water management and regulation.

Commissioned by the Cabinet Office, at the very heart of government, reflecting how central water is to so many aspects of our wellbeing and prosperity.

Reporting inside the first year allowing time for real action across the remainder of the next government’s term in office.

This will need to review the water regulators. Whilst it may be simplistic to pin all regulatory and enforcement challenges on resource, resoundingly practitioners pointed at this as a fundamental root cause.

Bigger pressures need stronger regulators to protect an environment that cannot protect itself. And that we as a society rely on.

It makes sense now to take a look at regulator configuration, powers, duties and capacity. 30 years on.

Water companies

Water companies: On no-one’s Christmas card list these days. Mistrusted. Resented. They have been allowed to evolve in a direction that is widely disliked.

In our survey, only six per cent of experts backed the current model. Bear in mind 18 per cent of respondents worked for water companies and a big proportion in their supply chain. That tells you something. If companies can’t change themselves they’ll need to be helped to.

Resoundingly, people’s motivations for working for water companies were those of public and environmental service.

These values must be formalised within the heart of water companies’ purpose, as clear licence conditions. There must be open-book transparency in reporting, structure and governance.

And no more reliance on operator self-monitoring for wastewater and sewerage.

Operator self-monitoring: It works, people told us. For drinking water. That’s serious – there’s real jeopardy and consequence there. Kill people and you’re in big trouble. Kill a few fish and, well, there’s plenty more in the river.

Except there aren’t now, are there? Back to robust regulation and enforcement.

Farming

But what about farming, we hear water companies cry? Quite so. The public know all about sewage pollution but only a third of those we spoke to were aware of farming’s impacts on water.

Farming of course manages most of our landscape and so has enormous potential to deliver better for our water.

From pollution management to the potentially massively untapped scope for healthier soils to deliver on flood risk management, water quality, and water resources.

People we spoke to widely felt that farmers shouldn’t be immune from the law. They believe there should be more farm inspections and far more concerted enforcement of farm regulations.

A pointer towards stronger regulators again.

But they also recognise that for many, more advice and support is needed. There’s a balance. So local context-specific advice – that crucially, is independent of input product manufacturers – should be expanded. Backed up by a ratcheting-up of sanctions and enforcement.

Added to this, a more serious approach to nutrient management. Nutrient enrichment is a huge threat to the health of our waters. We see algal blooms occurring more widely, in an ever-widening window in the calendar.

And of course, yes, nutrient pollution is frustrating development. The only rational way of tackling this is at source.

So a statutory, nutrient management programme must be developed which requires land managers to test ahead of applications, to build up better understanding of crop need, and a move towards understanding the maximum sustainable output of the landscape.

Intensive livestock production – the poor management of which is absolutely devastating some of our most treasured river catchments – must be better regulated.

Planning policies should prevent these operations where catchments are already nutrient-overloaded, and permitting of the wastes must effectively deal with the manures generated. Both on site as well as that sent off-site.

This should drive a move towards a far more circular economy approach to phosphorus use in the UK.

“Water can and should be a medium for regeneration, resilience and prosperity, unlocking verdant and healthy places to live which give us resilience in a climate change world.”

Catchment monitoring and management

Of course, to achieve all this we need to address that partial picture of the problem we have now. We need a national environmental monitoring strategy and programme that doesn’t target totemic emissions in a blanket way, but builds up a picture of what’s causing harm in each and every catchment.

So the causes can be tackled in a prioritised, systematic way.

People told us that right now we throw buckets of cash at some problems and barely monitor others. There are all kinds of opportunities with AI, machine learning and so-on to build on and enhance, as well as better-interrogate the data sets we do have.

Of course to enable this targeted and prioritised approach to catchment recovery and resilience, we need beefed-up catchment management.

There have been all kinds of system operator variants postulated in recent years and stakeholders agree: Something like this now has to happen.

Not “Catchment Based Approach Plus”, but something altogether bigger: With strategic planning heft and the power to convene all key local and regional stakeholders.

To assess and prioritise finance and investment flows across activities like water industry environment programmes, natural flood management, catchment management and more.

A model akin to current regional flood and coastal committees, with an independent chair, local authority participation, key landowner, business and infrastructure operator involvement should be able to set priorities, balance trade-offs and ensure less-siloed and more efficient use of money on multi-functional solutions.

Existing catchment partnerships could still play a role in engagement and delivery.

Sponge towns and cities

Of course most of us live and work in towns and cities and the built environment’s relationship with water is generally not one of harmony.

We culvert it, pipe it, over-use it, pollute it, then usher it away from our dwellings as fast as we can.

Our hard-skinned, water-phobic conurbations are increasingly polluted, increasingly flood-prone, overheat in summer and are severely denuded of anything natural.

That’s not good for us as healthy, resilient, productive citizens.

So we need to flip the old-school mentalities to building. Adopt a “sponge cities” approach to all the places we live – in both new development and existing.

Water can and should be a medium for regeneration, resilience and prosperity, unlocking verdant and healthy places to live which give us resilience in a climate change world.

You only have to look at sustainable drainage schemes in places like Cardiff and Sheffield, Enfield and on a whole new scale in Mansfield, to get a feel for how they can transform not just resilience but the whole look and feel of a place and a community.

This has to become the norm. We need to stop treating rainwater as a waste product and instead as a treasured and respected resource.

Public interest

And the public told us they want to know more about their water.

Where it comes from, what it costs, what’s invested in it.

Their new-found curiosity and concern for water resulting from the current media attention is an opportunity to nurture water-smart communities and citizens, who can help monitor, maintain and conserve their local water environments because they know more about them and care about them.

Two fundamental building blocks of this are metering and water efficiency. That Thames water had to recently cancel its smart metering programme – something which is a known enabler of leak-fixing and more efficient use – is a travesty.

And despite persistent political reticence to move towards near-universal metering our polling showed there is still considerable willingness to move to a meter. Vulnerable customers can be protected.

It beggars belief that given the scale of our water challenges, in this country measuring the water we use and paying for it on that basis is still – in parts at least – discretionary.

And whilst there has been welcome progress on water efficiency labelling and product standards, the pace of things generally has been glacial and too much of a battle for those great organisations who have made the case for wiser water use.

This is just a flavour of the public and experts’ vision of A Fresh Water Future. Please do read the report and look at the website. There’s a lot more on it and we’ll keep enriching the information on it over the coming months and years.

Fresh?

It’s dawned on me that the sad irony here is that there’s nothing fresh in what this work says.

It’s all been said before. Many times. The fresh thing is perhaps the degree of consensus from both public and experts that we have to do this.

We have no choice if we want things to get better.

We need a fresh water future. What this irony shows is that we know how to get there. We know what must be done.

Of course there will be a lot of detail to build out, but that can be done too.

We need A Fresh Water Future. But a Fresh Water Future, very definitely, is possible.