Draft Drought Plan 2025
At Welsh Water, our vision is “To earn the trust of customers, every day”. That vision aligns with our unique ownership structure: we have no shareholders and so can concentrate solely on delivering the best possible value for money to our customers.
All the profits that we make are reinvested in the business to improve outcomes for our customers and the environment and the communities that we serve.
We need to hold to this way of working every day, especially during stressful periods such as droughts which can be challenging for both ourselves and our customers. We are trusted to plan for drought and trusted to deliver these plans when drought periods occur – we must continue to earn that trust every day. Our Water Resources Management Plan and our Drought Plan are at the centre of this strategy.
Producing and maintaining a Drought Plan is a statutory process required by Government who have set out the legal basis for this in the Water Industry Act 1991. We are directed by Welsh Government who also provide the guiding principles for our plan. We have worked closely with Natural Resources Wales who produce the Drought Planning Guidance for water companies in Wales. Our Drought Plan sets out how we will deal with drought conditions within both the urban and rural parts of our supply area, and how we will monitor the effect of any actions that we take on the natural environment.
We last updated our Drought Plan in 2020 and we have first-hand experience of how well it performed during the 2022 drought. This updated Plan for 2025-30 is very much an evolution of our previous Plan. To aid the development of this Drought Plan, we ran a formal pre-consultation exercise with our stakeholders to help identify any key issues that we need to account for. Our pre-consultation engagement included over 1,000 recipients across a wide range of organisations such as local councils and councillors, Members of the Senedd, Members of Parliament, our Regulators, academic institutions and environmental organisations.
Our consultation on our draft Drought Plan ran from 10th January 2025 for eight weeks until the 7th March 2025. We are now reviewing the consultation responses and updating our Plan, so that we can submit a Revised Draft Drought Plan to Welsh Government on 25th April.
If you require any further information, or copies of supporting reports that are not published on our website, then please email Water.Resources@dwrcymru.com.