Water resources management plan

It is a statutory requirement that every five years water companies produce and publish a Water Resources Management Plan (WRMP). The WRMP should demonstrate that we have long term plans in place to accommodate the impacts of population growth, drought, our environmental obligations and climate change uncertainty in order to balance supply and demand.
It consists of several elements, including:

• A demand forecast. This describes how much water we think our customers will need in the future, considering factors such as climate change and population.
• A supply forecast. This illustrates how much water is available for use now and how this may change in the future. We consider the impact of climate change and potential reductions in the volume of water we can take from rivers and groundwater.
• An assessment of our options to meet demand, including leakage reduction and sustainable abstraction.

3. On our journey to the final plan we follow the statutory timetable set out by Welsh Government and NRW, we hold regular consultations with our customers and stakeholders to identify potential solutions, and we consider the environmental impacts alongside affordability.

Our Water Resources Management Plan must demonstrate:

• Resilience to a range of risks – e.g. drought, loss of supplies.
• Flexibility and adaptability – the plan must be robust to changes to supply and demand forecasts in the future.
• Approach to climate change – drier summers and wetter winters make it harder to meet peak demand.
• Sustainable abstraction options – which don’t deplete our natural resources, or have a negative effect on biodiversity and our local river environment.
• Planned proactive work – proactive maintenance of our network to reduce amount of water wasted by leakage and optimise the use of our sources.

We published the draft version of our next Water Resources Management Plan (dWRMP24) on 16 November 2022.  This latest plan looks ahead to what we plan to do between 2025 and 2085.  You can see the documents here.

We then held a 14 week consultation period, which ended on 22 February 2023 and we had many comments and queries on the plan.

We’ve now published our Statement of Response, where we show that we reviewed each of the comments and, where appropriate, how we’ve used the feedback to update and improve our plan.

We aim to publish the final plan, subject to approval, in the Autumn of 2023.

We published our Final Water Resources Management Plan (WRMP) and corresponding appendices in September 2019.

In March 2018 we published our draft WRMP for stakeholder consultation and we were pleased to receive comments from six different stakeholders. We reviewed all of these comments and, where appropriate, we used the feedback to update and improve our plan. In September 2018 we published a summary of the stakeholder feedback and we described the resulting changes to our plan. We also confirmed that the changes we made did not materially alter the recommendations made in our draft WRMP.

In July 2019 we received approval from the Welsh Ministers that we could publish our final WRMP.