Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

Transcription

1 Non-Technical Summary Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

2 About our draft Water Resources Management Plan Water supply is one of society s most important public services, supporting the economy, health and wellbeing. At Bristol Water we are committed to providing a reliable, affordable, high-quality service to the homes and businesses we supply - and we are also committed to ensuring that we do this in an environmentally sustainable way. In order to achieve good long-term management of the service we provide, we need to understand the needs of our customers and the environment, and to balance these needs. This document is a non-technical summary of Bristol Water s draft Water Resources Management Plan, our detailed long-term plan to balance the needs of water resource management in our supply area over a period until Bristol Water Water Resources Management Plan

3 What is a Water Resources Management Plan and why is one needed? Water supply is an essential service and needs to be delivered in a way which allows for economic growth, changes in population and a changing climate. To ensure that a reliable supply of water is available in the long term, planning must also be long term. As part of a transparent and responsible approach, our draft Water Resources Management Plan (referred to in this document as the WRMP) sets out our plans for water resource management over the next 25-year planning period, from 2020 to The full draft WRMP is available on our website and describes in detail the technical assessments we have carried out, ranging from the water available from the environment to projected long-term customer demand for water. This non-technical summary document provides the key information from our draft WRMP and we hope it will be a helpful way for a wider audience to understand our proposed plan. The WRMP presents the analysis required by our regulators and Government to support our longterm plans for water resource management. It ensures we have plans in place to enable us to continue providing a reliable supply of water to our customers while supporting a healthy environment and maintaining the level of service our customers expect at an affordable cost. Where we identify a need for action because there is a potential shortfall in available water (known as a supply-demand deficit), we assess a range of options to manage this deficit. Included in the options assessed are new water resources, help for customers to manage demand, reductions in leakage and changes in the ways we use existing water resources. All water companies are required to produce a WRMP and to update it every five years. Our previous WRMP was published in June 2014 and we are now reviewing and updating our plan using the latest information and assessment techniques so we can produce a final WRMP in Each WRMP builds on the one before, updating the plan based on the latest information, technology, regulatory guidance and the views of our customers and stakeholders. The WRMP includes a full assessment of significant long-term issues like population growth and climate change. The WRMP is reviewed every five years, so we are able to maintain a flexible approach to these long-term issues and use other solutions to longterm problems if better alternatives become available. Each WRMP therefore gives a planning approach that addresses any long-term issues and still enables us to deal with any issues that arise in the shorter term. Short-term actions identified in the plan (in the case of this WRMP, over the period from 2020 to 2025) are therefore likely to go ahead, but the options we have identified for implementation in the longer-term may change when the plan is next reviewed: this could be because the likely nature of the long-term water resource problem has changed, or because a better option becomes available. Water companies also produce a Business Plan every five years, explaining the company s approach for system operation, maintenance and improvements over the coming five-year period. Our Business Plan and WRMP are therefore closely linked; any projects and solutions required to address a supply demand deficit are evaluated in the WRMP, the detailed delivery plans for these are created through the Business Plan process, and customer preference survey results are shared between both approaches. Our WRMP also links closely with our Drought Plan, an operational plan which lays out our approach for managing drought events that are outside the scope of normal water resource management. Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

4 Background on Bristol Water We supply drinking water to a population of approximately 1.19 million people across an area of 2,400 km2 centred on Bristol. Our supply area extends from Thornbury and Tetbury in the north to Street and Glastonbury in the south, and from Weston-Super-Mare in the west to Frome in the east. Only around half of the water we supply comes from within this supply area, with the rest coming from a large abstraction on the Gloucester & Sharpness canal. The Mendip Reservoirs provide approximately 42% of our supply, with groundwater providing the remaining 12%. We manage the water stored in the Mendip reservoirs to ensure that we have sufficient water available during the drier summer months and peak demand periods. Taking water from the environment is known as abstraction, and the maximum volume of water we can abstract from each water source is controlled by the Environment Agency through abstraction licences. The volume we need to abstract depends on customer demand for water, which varies depending on factors such as the weather (in hot dry summer weather, water consumption goes up, but on a wet day in winter it could be significantly lower)- the average demand across our supply area in 2016 was just over 270 million litres each day. Because our water supply system is well-linked across the area we supply, we have no areas which are especially vulnerable to problems due to local shortages of water. We are therefore able to plan our water resource management on the basis of a single water resource zone - this is an area in which all the resources can effectively be shared. Pre-Consultation Throughout the development of our draft WRMP we have worked with our customers, stakeholders neighbouring water companies and regulators to ensure that their views and feedback are used to inform our draft WRMP. This process, known as pre-consultation, has enabled us to understand the views and preferences of interested parties and ensure they are properly considered in our plan. This plan differs from our previous plan, produced in 2014 when our analysis indicated a need to develop a new water resource at Cheddar. Our new approach has identified alternative ways to provide for a growing population through reduction in leakage and preconsultation with our regulators and customers was an extremely important part of this decision-making process. We have worked closely with the Environment Agency and Bristol Water s Customer Challenge Panel in the process of developing our draft WRMP, discussing the framework, technical methodologies, assumptions and decision-making processes we have followed. In May 2017 we also carried out a traditional pre-consultation process, writing to over a hundred organisations and individuals to explain our update work on the WRMP and seek feedback on any issues we should take into account during our WRMP review. This approach received a relatively low response when compared with the other engagement we have carried out around this plan, confirming that in order to get a representative range of opinions and feedback on our proposed WRMP, it is important that we take a very active role in reaching out to customers and businesses rather than relying on traditional consultation approaches. 4 Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

5 Our water supply area RIVER SEVERN Tetbury The water sources we use Yate BRISTOL CHANNEL Bristol Clevedon Bath Westonsuper-Mare Burnhamon-Sea Wells Glastonbury Supply Due to our changing climate and environmental requirements, the amount of water that is available from the environment for water supply will reduce over the 25 year planning period to Demand Demand for water is forecast to increase from now to We assess this based on population and property development forecasts published by Government and from our assessment of water used per person as well as water used by other non-household customers. Key Groundwater source Reservoir source River abstraction Frome 46% Gloucester & Sharpness Canal The Gloucester & Sharpness canal is owned and operated by the Canal and Rivers Trust and is supplied by the River Severn and other local rivers, the Cam and the Frome. The water from this source is used to supply our largest northern water treatment works. 42% Reservoirs We operate four major reservoirs, Chew Valley Lake, Blagdon, Cheddar and Barrow, which are supplied from river basins in the Mendip Hills. 12% Groundwater As rain soaks through the ground it is stored in porous rocks called aquifers. Our groundwater sources are all in shallow unconfined aquifers, hydraulically connected to local rivers. We pump the water to the surface, where it is treated and put into supply. Population supplied This map shows the Bristol Water, water resource zone Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

6 The WRMP approach Forecast supply and demand until 2045 Determine Supply Demand Balance Select options to meet any deficit To ensure we can provide a reliable and environmentally sustainable water supply, our plan is based on forecasts for a hot dry year, when there would be a reduction in the water available from the environment and an increased demand for water. By taking this cautious approach, we ensure that we have prepared well for dry weather before it happens and that our customers can rely on us to provide the water they need without causing damage to the environment. This assessment (the Supply Demand Balance) is done across the whole planning period to establish whether changes in population, water available or economic growth could cause a supply demand deficit at some time in the future. If this assessment shows that there is enough water to meet predicted demand across the planning period, no new projects or system changes are required. If we identify a deficit, the WRMP approach triggers the need to investigate options to manage this deficit, so we can be confident we can continue providing a reliable supply of water. Our position Our baseline Supply Demand Balance (the position we would predict if we take no action to address any deficit) indicates that we will encounter a small supply demand deficit in 2023, at just over half a million litres per day, about one-quarter of one percent of the water we supply. This will then increase to around 12.8 million litres per day by the end of the planning period in 2044/45, or about 5% of the current average water into supply. The deficit is mainly driven by: demand for water is higher than the available water and the supply demand balance is in deficit. We tested this approach with customers to check that there were not other measures that could also change this balance (such as working to a different standard for how often a hose pipe ban might need to be imposed) but our customers told us that they do not want to see a large change from the current level of service they receive. Baseline supply demand balance position Population growth: by 2045 we anticipate that there will be over a hundred thousand additional households within the area we supply Climate change: the affects the water available from our water sources and the water demand per person MI/day The graph below shows the baseline position for our supply-demand balance: where the red line crosses the dotted blue line, this means that Total Water Available Total water required 6 Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

7 Choosing options to address a future deficit To make sure we have selected the right options to address any future deficit, we have assessed all the options available to provide new supplies of water or to help manage demand. This process started with 148 options, which we assessed in detail before gradually narrowing the range down to the best options available. As we have a very wide range of options available to us for managing a supply demand deficit, we have shown the general categories below rather than the entire list, which is given in detail in our technical WRMP document. In order to make sure that we can provide an affordable, resilient and reliable supply of water, we need to consider the benefits and negative aspects of all these options including the financial cost (and impact on customer bills), our customers preferences and the environmental and social cost of each option so they can be compared against each other in a properly balanced way. Once we have identified options that can be implemented in an environmentally acceptable way, one of the most important assessment criteria is customer preference, so we tested all these principles and categories with customers in order to understand more about how they would value and compare the use of these options to manage a supply demand deficit. Our customers told us very clearly that they prefer the principle of reducing Category Definition Examples Demand Production Distribution Resource Supporting reduction in water used by customers Improving efficiency between the abstraction of water and its input to the distribution network Improving efficiency between the input of water to the distribution network and the point of consumption Increasing the amount of water we have available leakage and helping people become more water-efficient as a way to address a minor deficit in supply and demand, and as part of our consultation process for this draft WRMP we will carry out further testing of customer preference, including tests on the risk that it might be more expensive than our customers prefer to carry out the work required to reduce leakage to the level targeted in this draft plan. Promotion of water efficiency, provision of water-saving devices. Increasing performance of existing water sources, increasing capacity of treatment works Replacing pipes, tackling leakage, managing pressure, calming networks New water sources, new reservoirs, new transfers Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

8 Customer views Research Our research with customers has examined preferences on our proposed levels of service (how often we might need to impose restrictions such as a hosepipe ban), approaches on metering, leakage, new resources, water trading and support for water efficiency education. Because different survey methods can provide different answers to what may seem the same question, we have used a range of methods to engage with customers and stakeholders so we can get the best possible information on how to develop our WRMP. Our research included customer surveys, wholeday workshops with over a hundred customers, our new online customer panel, events at festivals and our online computer game system. We use a process called triangulation to assess the outcome of customer surveys, where we examine the responses we received from customers through different survey methods so we can identify where there is strong evidence for customer preference in one area, or areas where evidence may be less clear. Following this process, our customer surveys show us that customers preferences are No strong views on a benefit of trading water between water companies Customer research is an ongoing process and we anticipate we will have further results available as part of this ongoing programme of research which will inform our final WRMP. Where relevant, we will include this in our formal Statement of Response to the consultation on our WRMP. Bristol Water Challenge Panel Our Customer Challenge Panel is an independent group of expert stakeholders, whose role is to ensure that the customer s voice is at the heart of our planning process. The Panel is chaired by Peaches Golding OBE, Lord Lieutenant of Bristol, with representation from key stakeholders such as local Government, environmental regulators, academic organisations and charities. A key role of the Panel is to help us develop Business Plan proposals that properly reflect the views of customers and the interests of other stakeholders and the environment, including challenge on our customer engagment during the development of the WRMP. Engagement with other Key Stakeholders We have also engaged over 2016 and 2017 with a number of other stakeholders, both statutory and nonstatutory. These have included: Environment Agency Ofwat Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) Natural England Historic England Neighbouring water companies A very strong preference for reduction in leakage A strong preference for more water efficiency education Mixed views on whether to aim for a reduced risk of hosepipe bans Metering is the fairest way to pay but our customers felt strongly that they would not want us to implement univeral compulsory metering No strong views on a benefit of developing new water resources Bristol Water customers participating in one of several deliberative customer consultation workshops held in June Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

9 Our proposed solutions Following a detailed options appraisal, our current modelling has indicated that the following options are the best way to resolve our minor supply demand deficit during the period 2020 to 2045 Following a detailed options appraisal, our current modelling has indicated that the following options are the best way to resolve our minor supply demand deficit during the period 2020 to 2045 Between 2020 and 2025 we plan to reduce leakage by 6 million litres per day In 2034 we plan to reduce raw water losses to give an increase in water available of 4.7 million litres per day further out in the planning period (in 2039) we plan to reduce our bulk water supply transfer to Wessex Water, reducing the water we need to supply by 6.37 million litres per day. This reduction would only be done in consultation with Wessex Water, to ensure the best use of water resources in the region As our preferred options will involve reductions in leakage and bulk transfers of water, we do not anticipate that there will be any significant environmental impact from our plans. As customers told us that in addition to a strong preference for leakage reduction they also have a strong preference for an increase in water efficiency activity, we will carry out more customer engagement between the publication of our draft and final WRMP to learn more about these preferences and how best this work could be delivered. The outcome of this research will help us to develop our metering and water efficiency strategies in our final Business Plan for the period 2020 to MI/day Baseline supply demand balance position Total Water Available Total water required Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

10 Changes from the previous plan There are key differences between this plan and the previous plan (WRMP14) which identified a need for a new reservoir at Cheddar. It has now been confirmed that, under the circumstances that now apply, a new reservoir will not be required within the planning horizon to 2045 and the supply demand deficit shown on page 2 can be addressed by measures to reduce leakage and water demand. Different assumptions are now used on resilience (largely driven by drought preparedness: we are now planning to a more extreme drought scenario than was required in WRMP14) and headroom (we are now planning on the basis of a changing profile of risk across the planning period, in line with Environment Agency guidance). Considering the environment As a water company we depend on the health of the natural environment as the source of the water we provide to our customers. In order for us to rely on this environment, we must ensure that we do not damage it through the way we operate. All our water sources are closely monitored to ensure they are operated sustainably and that we comply with current and future legislation. Alongside our Water Resources Management Plan, we are also publishing a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), and a Habitats Regulations Assessment (HRA). These are statutory requirements which allow us to demonstrate the appropriateness and sustainability of our plan and our planned actions. The purpose of a Strategic Environmental Assessment is to: Identify any significant environmental effects of the options considered for the WRMP The best way to manage these effects Allow stakeholders to understand and comment upon these effects Inform Bristol Water s selection of water management options to be taken forward into the final WRMP. The HRA focuses on conservation, assessing the potential effects of implementing water management options. This ensures that sites which have been designated for their environmental or ecological value are not negatively impacted by projects driven by the WRMP. We have used these assessments to inform our choices for the best programme of water resource management in the period 2020 to As our preferred programme of work is focused on leakage reduction and changes in water transfers, we do not anticipate that there will be any significant environmental impacts as a result of implementing the plan. 10 Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

11 Regulatory process The process and timeline for developing our WRMP is outlined below. We follow a statutory process, which commences every 5 years, carefully following any guidance and direction from Government in respect of issues to consider and processes and techniques which are to be adopted as a minimum standard in the technical assessment Bristol Water Final WRMP14 published June Pre-consultation and preliminary discussions with regulators prior to preparing draft WRMP19, started in September Formal Direction from Government to update WRMP s received on 21 April Publication of the Draft WRMP for public consultation once directed by the Secretary of State (anticipated early 2018). Submission of Draft WRMP to the Secretary of State by 1st December Pre-consultation with customers and wider stakeholders prior to preparing draft WRMP19 during spring and summer Public consultation period proposed to last 12 weeks (anticipated to finish in Spring 2018). 10 Assessment of representations received and publication of a Statement of Response within 26 weeks of the start of the public consultation (anticipated summer 2018). Statement of Response and revised draft final WRMP sent to Secretary of State for review. 9 Bristol Water will prepare and publish its Final WRMP in accordance with any Directions from the Secretary of State (anticipated before June 2019). Secretary of state assesses the need for public hearing or inquiry on the Draft WRMP and may direct Bristol Water to make further amendments to its WRMP. Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan

12 Public consultation Feedback, questions and comments on our plan are a very important part of our process to create the best possible plan for how we manage water resources. Via to: water.resources@defra.gsi.gov.uk (cc ing water.resources@bristolwater.co.uk, water-company-plan@environment-agency.gov.uk, and wrmp@ofwat.gsi.gov.uk) Although the full technical WRMP is freely available to any person or organisation wishing to provide feedback, we hope that our non-technical summary will provide information that enables customers and stakeholders to understand the most important aspects of the plan and to provide feedback. Please title your Bristol Water draft Water Resources Management Plan This consultation feedback is extremely important to us and will provide a guiding principle for the way we develop our final Water Resources Management Plan. If you have any comments, concerns, questions or issues you would like to clarify about our plan, please provide these through the contact details below - we will be carrying out a period of public consultation on the plan for a period of 12 weeks from 8th March to 31st May 2018 and we will reply to all the issues raised during this through a formal Statement of Response to this consultation process: this will be produced within 26 weeks of the start of our consultation process. Or via letter to: Secretary of State for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, WRMP c/o Water Resources Policy Area 3D Nobel House 17 Smith Square London SW1P 3JR Although you are free to provide any response or ask any question you wish during this consultation process, the following questions may provide a helpful prompt in addition to your own questions: Do you think there might be something missing from our plan that we need to consider? Are you happy that our plan strikes the right balance of risk for the short and long-term? Do you have any concerns that the plan might lead to unaffordable water bills? Do you agree with our approach to manage any supplydemand deficit through demand reduction measures such as leakage reduction? Thank you for reading this document. Your help in developing our long-term plan is a crucial part of our work to ensure that we provide a reliable, affordable and sustainable supply of water to over a million people Bristol Water Draft Water Resources Management Plan Registered number