Strategic water resource solutions

With challenges of climate change and population growth, it’s more important than ever that we have a plan to secure our water supplies for the future.

We forecast that we face a shortfall of over 1 billion litres of water every day for our customers in the next 50 years. That's enough to fill around 400 Olympic sized swimming pools.

The main factors that affect how much additional water we’ll need in the future are:

A growing population
A changing climate
The need to provide increased resilience to droughts
Reductions in the amount of water we take from rivers and groundwater to improve the environment

This is a huge challenge that we’re taking very seriously.

As part of Water Resources South East, we’re working with five other water companies in the south east, as well as customers, stakeholders, and other water-using sectors. Together, we've developed plans to address our future water resources challenges.

We've secured government approval of our Water Resource Management Plan (WRMP). This lays out our strategy to provide a secure and sustainable water supply for the next 50 years.

The plan sets out how we'll meet the needs of an increasing population, protect and improve the environment, and manage the risks from a changing climate that brings hotter drier summers and more frequent droughts.

We're setting a target to halve leakage by 2050 and install a further one million smart water meters in customers’ homes. New water resources are at the centre of our Plan, including a new river abstraction on the Thames, close to Teddington Weir. This will be supported by water recycling, and a new reservoir in Oxfordshire, south west of Abingdon.

Proposed new reservoir in Oxfordshire

We’re currently working on designs for a new reservoir located to the south west of Abingdon. The reservoir will help protect public water supplies during periods of drought. We’re on track to apply for development consent to the Planning Inspectorate in 2026. You can find out more about our proposals on our project website.

What we have done so far

In June 2024, we launched a public consultation. The consultation covered design options and an interim master plan for the reservoir. In summer 2025, we published our Summer Update summarising the feedback.

Alongside this, we’ve also released our Statement of Response. The Statement of Response details how we have considered the feedback we received. It also details the changes to our proposals that have been made as a result.

Upcoming public information events

We’re hosting a series of local public information events. The events will provide an opportunity to view the project plans and ask questions.

You can find details of these events by visiting: thames-sro.co.uk/events. To help us manage numbers, we'd be grateful if you could register your attendance in advance.

Teddington Direct River Abstraction consultation

We’re holding a statutory consultation on the Teddington Direct River Abstraction (TDRA) project. This is a vital drought resilience project for London.

Communities, customers, and stakeholders are invited to share their feedback on:

Project design, operation, and maintenance
Indicative construction activities and schedule
Potential effects on communities and the environment
Managing potential environmental effects
Land needed for the project and how it would be used
Draft overarching Design Principles
Opportunities to enhance local spaces

The consultation runs from 17 June to 26 August 2025. The feedback we receive will help us shape our proposals to keep water flowing for the future. For more information and to respond to the consultation, visit our consultation page.

Background

Ofwat provided funding to investigate and develop strategic water resource solutions that will benefit customers and wider society, and help to protect and enhance the environment.

The Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development (RAPID), a joint team made up of the three water regulators: Ofwat, the Environment Agency and the Drinking Water Inspectorate, was set up to support and oversee this work.

RAPID is overseeing more than a dozen projects across several water companies including recycling, desalination, transfers between regions and reservoirs to identify optimal regional solutions that could be started in 2025-2030.

RAPID has introduced a new regulatory process which sets out the activities that need to be completed, allows comparison of the solutions at regular intervals, and has clear checkpoints, or gates, to assess progress and determine which solutions should be taken forward for further work. Learn more about RAPID and the gated process.

What are our strategic resource solutions?

In this section you can read about each of the solutions including the technical reports, additional information provided to RAPID and feedback from RAPID.

Gate 2 reports were submitted to RAPID in November 2022. RAPID published its final decision on each of the solutions on 28 June 2023.

Gate 1 reports were submitted in July 2021.