Final Water Resources Management Plan 2019

We have a clear vision in Welsh Water, which is to earn the trust of our customers every day. This will not be achieved by great customer service alone but by also understanding our customers’ needs and expectations and building future plans to meet these.

One of our most important functions is to ensure that our customers will always have sufficient water supply to meet their needs now and into the future and so we have set out a strategy of ‘Enough Water For All’ within our “Welsh Water 2050” Vision.

It is clear that having a reliable supply of water is important to our customers and that we should fully understand the capability of our systems including how we will respond to future trends. Our Final Water Resources Management Plan looks out across 30 years from 2020 to 2050 to assess any risks in our ability to supply sufficient water to meet the demand from our customers even during the driest years. The Plan demonstrates where we believe we have sufficient water to meet demand into the future and where we do not, explains what we will do to resolve any imbalances.

The key approaches for this plan are:

• To ensure that the views of our customers are properly taken into account, particularly on service levels and the cost of the Plan;
• To take account of Welsh Government policy in the Environment (Wales) Act 2016 and The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and align with its “Water Strategy for Wales 2015”. Using the ecosystem services approach, we will work towards more integrated management of our water resources;
• To consider all available options to balance supply with demand when water supply deficits are forecast to exist over the planning period;
• To provide the reasoning on why options are selected and why they are best value for customers and the environment;
• To prioritise demand management over supply side options where the wider benefits of doing so provide a best value solution. To this end we have set ourselves challenging but achievable long term leakage reduction and customer consumption targets
• To investigate the opportunities for trading water resources with 3rd parties where this is to the benefit of our customers and not to the detriment of the environment;
• To ensure that the Plan is compliant with all relevant European and domestic statutory requirements and to carry out a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and Habitats Regulations Assessment (HRA) for the Plan;
• To improve the resilience of supply systems to pressures such as drought and climate change;
• To be innovative in our approach to our Plan.

We published our draft Water Resources Management Plan in March 2018, consulting upon this for a period of 12 weeks, following which we published a Statement of Response to the consultation and a revised draft Water Resources Management Plan in September 2018. Following a review of our Statement of Response to the consultation and the changes made in our revised draft Water Resources Management Plan, on the 8th March 2019 Welsh Government gave us direction to publish our Final Water Resources Management Plan.

The Final Water Resources Management Plan is available below. The Final set of Water Resources and Market Information tables, Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) report and Post Adoption Statement (PAS) and Habitats Regulations Assessment (HRA) report will be published shortly.