Working towards a sustainable future
The twin challenges of climate change and population growth mean all water companies will need to balance shrinking water supplies with growing demand between now and 2050.
At the same time as we face these challenges, we are seeing significant societal change. Our customers expect better service, are more concerned about both their health and the environment, and continue to value fairness, particularly towards vulnerable customers.
During 2022, we saw public attitudes to our industry shift substantially as climate change began to affect water supplies, and the importance of river quality and biodiversity became apparent.
These trends take place against a backdrop of weak economic performance and, as the UK’s economic outlook remains challenging, the need for affordable water bills has never been greater.
Tackling climate change, cleaning up our rivers, securing our future water supplies and enhancing biodiversity can only be solved with long-term thinking and planning.
The challenges
Based on research carried out for our Strategic Direction Statement in 2021, we foresee six main challenges that the water sector needs to navigate between now and 2050. These are outlined below.
Climate change is predicted to bring more extreme rainfall, and continued urbanisation means that flooding is more likely. If no action is taken, we expect 16% more spills from storm overflows by 2050, with 45% more properties at risk of internal flooding.
Summers in our region are predicted to be 2.6°C warmer and 16% drier on average by 2050.
We expect concern about environmental matters to grow as the consequences of climate change and other environmental challenges become more apparent to the general public. This will drive greater scrutiny of our operations and their impact on the environment.
We expect the number of people living in our region to grow by 12% and the number of properties by 20%.
This means we will need an additional 130 ML/d of water by 2050.
Meeting the Government's long-term targets and resilience requirements will require material investments in our network. These will feed through to bills and impact affordability.
The level of investment required across the sector will test the supply chain that we rely on.
Brexit, Covid-19 and the conflict in Ukraine have disrupted supply chains and reduced capacity, which may limit the work we can deliver.
Meeting these challenges means we need to make the most of advancements in technology. We need to both roll out proven innovation quickly and play our part in developing new technology. We should adopt newer, collaborative approaches (such as multi-utility customer behaviour change).
To do this, we will need to work with customers, communities and other stakeholders to drive change – and to step up investment in data-gathering and AI technologies. We also need to make several informed, pragmatic choices about the scale and pace of our actions. Our 2050 challenges are strongly interlinked and, in some cases, in conflict.
For example, the high cost of living means we need to keep bills affordable; at the same time, we need to invest significantly to meet government targets on river quality improvement and greenhouse gas reduction. In setting our ambition, we need to take a long-term perspective and balance the needs of different stakeholders – both present and future.
In addition to these sector wide challenges, we also have regional and local challenges.
These include:
For more details
For more details on the challenges we face and our strategic plans to address these challenges, please see our strategic direction statement and our long-term delivery strategy.