Ofwat must do more to make the water industry in England and Wales protect the environment, the government has said.
Setting out the priorities for the regulator for the next five years the environment minister Rebecca Pow said water companies should significantly reduce the frequency and volume of sewage discharges from storm overflows.
In a strategic policy statement laid before parliament on Wednesday, the government urged Ofwat to challenge water companies on how they would be more ambitious in protecting the environment, and deliver resilient and sustainable water supply.
Pow said: “The priorities we are setting out today build on the work we have already undertaken to reduce harm from storm overflows, improve monitoring and reporting of pollution incidents, making this more transparent, to tackle runoff from agriculture, and protect the health of our rivers and seas.”
Ofwat is responsible for setting out what water companies should focus their investment on during each five-year spending cycle, the next of which is 2025 to 2030.
Martin Salter, the head of policy at the Angling Trust, said he feared the guidance given to Ofwat could fall well short of what was needed to end the scandal of untreated sewage polluting the nation’s rivers.
He said the policy statement failed to ensure a step-change in investment by water companies in outdated waste water infrastructure, which has resulted in record levels of discharges in untreated sewage from facilities that can no longer meet demand.
In 2020, water companies released raw sewage via storm overflows into rivers more than 400,000 times over a total of 3.1m hours.
Salter: “We were hoping for more than warm words in this water policy statement and a bit of restating the pollution monitoring provisions that are already in the Environment Act. This is the government’s opportunity not just to will the end of pollution but to actually deliver the means by getting Ofwat to allow much needed investment to flow into England’s creaking and leaking waste water infrastructure.”
The Rivers Trust said the regulator had for too long been too narrowly focused on keeping costs down in the short-term, with little regard for long-term impacts on the environment and the legacy for future generations.
Amina Aboobakar, the commercial director for the Rivers Trust, said the statement needed to be more ambitious. She said: “It fails to specify the need for transformational change, provides no direct guidance around investment gaps in failing/ageing infrastructure and how this is to be addressed through the price review, and for the need for water companies to drive more environmental resilience.”
Water UK, which represents the industry, said it had long stressed the need for regulation to take a long-term view of the sector and allow increased investment to help address the acute challenges posed by climate change and population growth.
“Ofwat must now work with water companies to ensure that the next price review enables the sector to meet government targets by authorising investment in the right schemes such as net zero and improving river water quality,” it said.
