Want to know our plans to cope with water shortage because of a drought?

We all know it’s better to be well prepared in case of challenging circumstances. At Anglian Water, we have a Drought Plan which details how we propose to manage water resources during a drought, to protect water resources and the environment. As part of our statutory requirements, we update this Plan every 5 years. Our current Drought Plan was published in April 2022 (Drought Plan 2022 or DP22) and these documents are available to view at the bottom of this webpage.

Over the last few months, we have been developing our next Drought Plan (DP27). We launched the public consultation on our draft DP27 on 11 May 2026, which will be open for ten weeks, until 17 July 2026. We welcome your views and you can respond to our consultation by sending an email with Anglian Water in the subject field to the Secretary of State at water.resources@defra.gov.uk. Please also copy in our drought mailbox – drought@anglianwater.co.uk.

 

Representations by post should be sent to:  Drought Plan Consultation, Defra, Drought, Seacole, 2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF

 

We will consider all representations received by 17 July 2026 and will publish our Statement of Response to outline any changes we have made to our Plan by 9 October 2026. The Secretary of State will then consider whether to issue any directions for our Drought Plan prior to final publication which will likely be in early 2027.

 

Our draft DP27 is made up of several documents, including the main plan, customer and stakeholder summary, appendices and environmental assessments. We have checked to ensure that our Plan does not include any information that would be contrary to the interests of national security and is commercially confidential. 

 

The draft DP27 documents are available to view and download below:

 

Water Resources Management Plan

Every five years we produce a Water Resources Management Plan (WRMP), which our Drought Plan links closely with. Our current Plan (WRMP24) is available to view.

WRMP24 sets out how we will manage the water supplies in our region to meet current and future needs, looking ahead across the next 25 years and beyond, in order to drive further investment to mitigate challenges such as:

 

  • Climate change
  • Protecting the environment
  • Population growth

 
Our WRMP24 strategy focuses on:

 

  • Demand management - building on our smart metering strategy will allow us to communicate with our customers more effectively, encourage them to use less water, and enable us to identify leaks on customers' properties more quickly.  Demand management is a crucial part of our plan to ensure we have time to assess, plan for, and construct our new supply-side options.
  • Two new raw water reservoirs - one in the Fens and another in Lincolnshire will supply water to around 625,000 homes.  They have the potential to provide other great benefits too, such as wellbeing for communities and new habitats for wildlife.
  • Utilising other sources of water, such as water reuse, desalination and transfers.
     
    The WRMP24 also sets out how we will make our water supply system resilient to a 1 in 500-year drought event by 2039 - an improvement from the current 1 in 200-year drought resilience.

Drought Plan 2022

For reference our current published Drought Plan (DP22) documents are also available to view and download below: