Rethinking Water Planning

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Why is the project relevant to you?

With the introduction of DWMPs water companies now have a statutory duty to plan aspects of each water discipline: water resource, water quality, and flood risk. These plans are currently separate, however there are efficiencies to be made by considering them together and understanding the full value of interventions to the wider system prior to selecting them. The methods tested in this project - integrated modelling and systems mapping/thinking - will support the water industry to transition to a more integrated approach. However, we recognise that the outputs of this project need to be scrutinised from a practitioner perspective to determine deliverability.

Key messages for Water Industry

Water companies are responsible for two of the four statutory water plans that we have considered and looked to integrate through the options selection process. DWMPs and WRMPs are also the two plans where the project demonstrates there is the simplest opportunity to integrate.

We would encourage you to use this work to highlight through your role/remit that a change in approach to decision making could be beneficial to the delivery of statutory environmental objectives and wider outcomes.

The approaches tested have been designed to be undertaken before, or as part of, the development of a major new strategic plan. To effectively integrate the different water disciplines this ‘live’ approach would need to be run at regular intervals and considered each time one of the ‘core plans’ is reviewed and updated. The next point where we recommend one of these approaches being undertaken is after the publication of WINEP in Q1 2029, at which point WRMP and DWMP options will also be most up to date.

The project had to find the balance between trying to cover multiple aspects of water, over a large area, and the resource demands that come with different levels of detail. We accepted that this type of multi criteria review and option selection would not have as much confidence as the sector specific modelling that is undertaken. Therefore finding the right place to input these approaches into the process, (likely in an iterative way) with the detailed optioneering work is critical.