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I N F O C U S R E P O R T

– why CSOs aren’t the only challenge In this report

Introduction

People Engaging customers and other key stakeholders

Process Tackling bureaucratic blockers and optimising performance

Technology Leveraging new technologies and data

WATER POLLUTION

which have been anonymised. This report considers the opportunities for the sector to improve water quality and rebuild public trust, covering three core topics:

People – What role must consumers play in tackling water pollution? How can water companies utilise analytics and predictive insights to support better engagement with key stakeholders, including the agriculture sector?

Process – What are the fundamental bureaucratic challenges hampering water companies’ progress on pollution management? How can better data help to streamline processes and optimise performance against environmental objectives?

Technology – What are the key challenges across legacy monitoring systems? How is the use of data and the modelling of water quality evolving, and what are the barriers to the adoption of new technologies?

Introduction As public awareness of environmental issues grows, the spotlight is firmly on water quality. Water companies across the UK and Europe are under increasing pressure to alleviate their environmental impact and protect vital rivers, streams and watercourses.

However, with this increased scrutiny on the water sector and its approach to pollution management, it is crucial that the focus goes beyond the widely discussed issue of combined sewer overflows (CSOs).

While there are varied challenges across the continent, there are undoubtedly key lessons to be learnt and best practice to be shared both nationally and internationally.

Utility Week, in association with Innovyze, has captured the views of water sector experts from both the UK and Europe on the complex challenges that must be tackled to address the root causes of pollution. All comments were made during a virtual debate, under Chatham House Rule, and follow-up interviews

What are the challenges facing water companies both in the UK and Europe when it comes to addressing pollution? This report from Utility Week, in association with Innovyze, sets out the bureaucratic barriers facing the sector, the importance of collaboration with stakeholders, and the role technology can play to help support progress towards environmental objectives.

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People While the issue of water quality is high on the political and media agenda, water companies are under increased pressure to reduce their environmental impact. However, one pollution control expert said that more focus should be on collective public responsibility, not just water companies.

“When people are agitated about the state of our water, I often ask ‘what are you doing to make it better?’ A lot of people flush wet wipes and sanitary products, or put oils and fats into the sewer, which can cause horrific effects on the water environment. If you drive a car, where does your road runoff go?,” they said.

“This isn’t just the fault of the water companies. This is the fault of all of us. We are the people who put the sewage into the sewers, we are the people who want to be in the rivers, so we all have a responsibility to help resolve this problem.”

There has to be a shift away from everybody focussing on faecal indicator organisms towards recognising that there is a huge array of pollutants nationally.”

We need more investment in protecting aquatic wildlife, not just the people who want to swim in rivers.”

I think the industry needs an overhaul to ensure that different bodies and different regulators can work more closely with each other and with the water companies.”

We need to focus on technologies like digital twins and modelling to allow us to say where the problem is so that we are solving the right problem in the future and not just constantly shouting about CSOs.”

If customers and stakeholders don’t understand how the water industry works, how it is funded and how long some of these processes are going to take, there is always going to be a friction between what we can do and what we are expected to do.”

Each water company looks at their CSOs and says which of their CSOs is the worst, but actually we should be looking at the picture nationally. We are guilty of regionalising our priority planning, but that’s not necessarily the best approach.”

They insisted that “a huge shift in blame” has to be achieved, adding: “We need to spread the blame and spread the love.”

One executive from a European water company agreed that a shift in public attitudes is important. They said that “education, skills and transparency” are needed to help achieve this change. “But it’s not enough – this needs to be supported with the right data and insights from across the network.”

Improving engagement with the public and sharing more information about local water quality is key. “In some places, certainly in smaller rural and suburban areas, information can be shared on social media and can be very valuable,” explained another executive. “When people know that their storm overflow is going off all the time, it seems to really animate them, which is excellent.”

Key takeaways from the debate

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However, they added “it would be lovely if we could have the same level of interrogation and analytics on other pollutant sources”, such as car emissions and sediment, not just CSOs.

There was consensus from all of the contributors to this report that tackling CSOs must not be at the detriment of tackling other causes of water pollution.

From a UK perspective: “The reason CSOs are in the news at the moment is because Surfers Against Sewage had a brilliant media campaign. They shared the argument so now the next batch of legislation and the next batch of technology will reflect that.

“But there’s a danger in that – we can’t just focus on one or two things and ignore everything else. Then in five years’ time, there will be uproar over why we have problem B, when we have spent all of our time, effort and money on problem A.”

Time for bold choices

The need for greater government intervention to help reduce pollution was also discussed as a means of supporting the public in reducing pollution.

“I think most people want to do the right thing, but they also want life to be easy, especially here and in many other European countries,” said one UK executive. “If you make a choice easy for people, they will take that easy choice. If we start from the top down, there are simple things the government can do to legislate.”

One example is the use of wet wipes which were described by one contributor as “the bane of every asset manager’s life”. They added: “All of the wet wipe manufacturers include ‘certified flushable’ on the packaging because they work to a different standard to the water companies.

“If the government said that for all packaging you must use the same standard as water companies to determine whether wipes are flushable or not, then suddenly all of these products would be biodegradable and dissolvable to the point where they can go into the sewer. That would drive the market in a certain direction and it would make people’s lives a lot easier.”

However, another industry insider complained that governments are often “too weak and too beholden to businesses to be sufficiently robust”. “People will continue to cause environmental harm, not on purpose but through laziness. It is frustrating because the people we need to reach and the people whose behaviour needs to change are the people who won’t. I think the government just needs to be braver when it comes to eradicating some of these products completely.”

UK action on water pollution

Last year the UK government published its Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan, bringing in robust targets on sewage pollution. As part of the plan, water companies are being required to deliver the largest infrastructure programme in their history, which will equate to a £56 billion capital investment over 25 years.

As well as infrastructure investment, the government has unveiled new plans that will see further funds directed to improving water quality. Money from fines handed out to water companies that pollute rivers and seas will be re-invested in schemes that benefit the natural environment.

Since 2015, the Environment Agency has concluded 56 prosecutions against water and sewerage companies, securing fines of over £141 million.

At present, money from fines imposed by Ofwat and those arising from Environment Agency prosecutions is returned to the Treasury. Under the new plans, ringfenced funds will go to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and will be invested directly back into environmental and water quality improvement projects. This could include initiatives to restore water environments by creating wetlands, re-vegetating river banks and reconnecting meanders to the main channel of rivers.

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with. Ensuring bacteriological pollution is not impacting wildlife is also incredibly important for us.”

For the UK, one water executive said the sector needs better focus on the toxic pollutants that affect aquatic wildlife, rather than “just the faecal indicator organisms and pathogens that are harmful to humans”.

“Toxins and oxygen levels are the most important thing for aquatic wildlife, so that’s where we should be focussing more of our attention to ensure that insects, fish and amphibians can live and thrive in the rivers.”

They added that people often voice support for protecting the planet, but in reality they are not willing to make “uncomfortable choices” that would impact their lifestyle. “Very few people are making the necessary changes because they think ‘why should I when nobody else is?’ In England, we are particularly guilty of that mindset.”

Focus on wildlife

As well as engagement with the general public, continued collaboration with the agricultural sector is crucial. One UK water expert said that the farming community has broadly embraced its responsibility to help protect the environment. “They really understand the concept of farming alongside wildlife, not replacing wildlife.”

A water modelling expert from a French water company said that protecting local ecology should be at the forefront of decision making. “Water quality is important to allow people to use it for swimming and so on, but it is not the only issue we are concerned

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Collaboration and clarity There was broad agreement among contributors that continued collaboration between water utilities, regulators, governments, customers and other key stakeholders is critical to tackle pollution.

However, concerns were raised that the UK water sector is too “disjointed” and there are “too many organisations with very niche responsibilities”. “You have the Environment Agency, Rivers Authority, the water companies etc. Everyone is responsible for a slightly different part of the system. So either nothing gets done or organisations focus on looking after their little section without sharing. I think there needs to be a lot more joined-up thinking, which has to come from the top.”

In addition, there was agreement that there is scope for regulators both in the UK and Europe to share more information and data where appropriate.

One UK water expert insisted that Ofwat often “shares the bare minimum, and sometimes not even that”. “But that goes both ways. When something goes wrong, water companies tend to clam up and are not so keen to share with the regulator.”

Ofwat was also criticised for a perceived lack of clarity around its expectations for companies. “For example, they’ll give water companies a figure they have to hit but they won’t have any conversation about the best ways to achieve it. I think more sharing and grown up conversations with the regulators would be beneficial all round.”

Process The UK’s current price review cycle was labelled as a major challenge for the sector’s progress on pollution. An engagement lead at a UK water company said: “The funding process for the water industry can be really difficult because we create business models based on asset management plans every five years.

“So every five years we need to submit a new business plan rather than having more longer-term thinking. That can also make it difficult explaining to customers why bills might fluctuate every few years.”

Looking ahead, Ofwat will require companies to make business planning decisions within a longer- term context. For PR24, five-year business plans

should be set out in the context of a 25-year delivery strategy. According to the regulator, this shift will help to ensure that what is delivered in the short term is likely to maximise long-term value for customers, communities and the environment.

From a European perspective, one official from a water utility called for increased regulatory focus on aquatic wildlife. They said: “Monitoring rivers is not enough, we need more investment to ensure water pollution is reduced and wildlife is protected. “There is a lot more that can be done but it is so important that action is taken now, not in five or 10 years.”

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Another contributor added that water companies rightly invest significantly in their monitoring programmes, but bemoaned the dearth of similar investment from other stakeholders. “All of those organisations, from the Environment Agency to National Highways, should be monitoring all sources of pollution.

“We should have monitoring in watercourses, which would tell us where the water pollution is coming from urban surfaces, highway surfaces, agricultural runoff and trade discharges. If water companies have to monitor their discharges upstream and downstream, why is the same not true of these other organisations? It is unacceptable to solely focus on the water companies when it comes to water pollution.”

Technology

While collaboration and more joined-up thinking are key to the sector’s progress on water pollution, there is an opportunity for new technologies and data insights to facilitate improved information sharing and stakeholder engagement. However, despite a lot of data already being publicly available, it can often appear too complex and inaccessible, according to a European water expert. “It can be difficult to decipher what data is really important and useful.

“I would love to see is the data democratised and shared out so that everyone can access it because that’s when you will see real change. If everyone sees all of that data, they can see how bad CSOs are, or how high the phosphorous or mercury levels are and what effect it could have on them. That’s when people start to care.”

As part of the drive to democratise data, one UK executive praised the “brilliant citizen scientists” who regularly share water quality data online. “They provide some wonderful visualisations and it allows everyone to see the information and compare one region to another.

“People and companies can then be held to account. Plus, if all of the data is available, then you’re not just focussing on one thing. We all agree that’s when things start to become a problem because everything else goes downhill when you focus on one thing.”

New rules For UK water companies, facing a new regulatory requirement for monitoring storm overflows has created fresh challenges and opportunities. A UK water company executive said that this new data has come with its own difficulties. “Firstly, there has to be the delivery of getting the sensors and monitors in place, which need to be in place by 2025. It is very much an accelerated scheme but hopefully everyone should hit it. We certainly will,” they said.

“Then the challenge is what do we do with that data? How do we use it? How do we learn from it? What do we do when there are false alarms? And how do we react to that? It is quite overwhelming and requires the skills and the know-how to be able to deal with that process of delivery.”

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© Faversham House Ltd 2022.

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