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’ 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.

Latest update

Proposed new reservoir to the southwest of Abingdon

We’re part of the way through a process of preparing designs for a new reservoir located to the southwest of Abington. We’re on track to submit an application for development consent to the Planning Inspectorate in 2026.

In June 2024, we launched a public consultation on emerging design options and our interim master plan for the reservoir site. You can find out more about our proposals by visiting our website.

Teddington Direct River Abstraction

In Autumn 2023, we held a public consultation on the initial site options for the project and carefully reviewed the feedback we received. As a result, we’ve made several changes to our proposals. These include:

A new design and construction method for the tunnel
A revised route corridor
An updated discharge location for the “sweetening flow”, needed to support the new tertiary treatment facility
Removal of four of the five originally proposed intermediate shafts.

You can find out more information on our website, including details about our latest community events.

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.