The Government & Ofwat have today announced that over £1.6 billion of new investment will be directed into vital infrastructure to improve the water quality of our rivers, lakes and coastal waters, and to secure future water supplies.
This investment follows a request from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to English water companies to accelerate investments between now and 2025 to tackle storm overflow discharges, reduce nutrient pollution from treatment works and address water resilience challenges.
This announcement comes ahead of the Government’s Integrated Plan for Water, which will be published in due course, and will set out how we can achieve cleaner and more plentiful water for future generations. The investment announced today will ensure improvements are made more quickly to address the unacceptable levels of pollution in waterways and deliver for customers.
As part of the new package of investment, companies will commit £1.1 billion to help eliminate harm caused by storm overflows. A further £400 million will be spent on water resilience schemes and £160m to help reduce nutrient pollution.
This investment includes major new projects such as:
- United Utilities reducing around 8,400 spills per year, including reducing discharges into Lake Windermere (£800 million)
- Yorkshire Water improving wastewater treatment infrastructure in Ilkley to improve the bathing water quality of the River Wharfe (£67 million)
- South West Water upgrading assets and storage to reduce discharges in Falmouth and Sidmouth (£70 million)
- Anglian Water accelerating its regional storm overflow reduction plan in the east of England (£27 million)
- Essex and Suffolk Water increasing water resilience in their area to better meet the needs of local customers including businesses (£18 million)
- Severn Trent rolling out smart meters and modifying its Draycote Water reservoir in Warwickshire to increase water capacity (£70 million)
This is an issue that has been raised with me on several occasions locally, which is why I am pleased that the Government has rightly recognised the need for investment to address the challenges to our water system of storm overflows, river and bathing water quality and drought resilience.
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