Our teams work hard every day to ensure customers have a safe, resilient water supply on tap. However, this is getting harder as our region faces many challenges which impact the amount of water available to us.

 

The impacts of these challenges are alarming, as over a third of our water supplies will be lost by 2050. Without long-term planning and action, there will simply not be enough water to supply our customers in the future, despite our leadership in leakage reduction, efficient use of water by our customers facilitated by metering and our investment in resilience.

That’s why we never stop looking for ways to futureproof our region for generations to come. A key part of planning ahead for the future is our Water Resources Management Plan (WRMP), which we produce every five years. It sets out how we will manage the water supplies in our region to meet current and future needs, looking ahead 25 years or more, in order to mitigate challenges such as:
 

Climate change

We have an excellent track record of investing in resilience. This meant we were able to avoid a hosepipe ban in this region despite the record temperatures and drought in summer 2022. However, we are experiencing hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters. Drought is expected to become more common. Ultimately, the changing climate impacts the groundwaters and river catchments we use to supply drinking water, and reduces the amount of water we have available for customer taps.

Need to protect the environment

Reducing the amount of water we take from rivers and water sources is one of the biggest actions we can take to protect the environment. We are working with the Environment Agency to cap our abstraction licences in the short-term, as well as drive longer-term environmental improvements including through the Water Industry National Environment Programme.

We believe that taking less water from the environment is the right thing to do; h. However, it means we must find alternative ways to keep taps flowing. This is becoming increasingly difficult as there are limited opportunities for us to increase output from our existing water sources or optimise our water network further. Instead, we need to develop significant infrastructure such as new raw water storage reservoirs and water reuse, both of which have long delivery timescales.  

Population growth

The East of England experienced the highest growth rates in the United Kingdom in the 10 years to the 2021 census. We expect this to continue with an additional 911,000 people predicted to live in our region by 2050.  

A step-change in demand management - we have a strong track record for  managing the impact of growth. We put about the same amount of water into supply now as we did back in 1989, despite a 30% population increase in that time. However, opportunities for reducing water usage and leakage are becoming increasingly limited, as we have invested heavily in leakage reduction and metering since privatisation remaining at the forefront of the industry in this field.  Building on our leadership in these areas, we have invested significantly in smart metering and smart networks, allowing us to understand consumption like never before, which we will use to develop more innovative methods to drive the next step change in reducing demand.

Our latest WRMP- WRMP24 demonstrates how we will mitigate these challenges, ensuring a sustainable and secure supply of clean drinking water for our customers from 2025 to 2050. This long term plan also shows how we will balance resilient water supplies with the needs of the environment, our customers and affordability, all building on our previous plan, WRMP19.

 

Our WRMP24 strategy focuses on:

  1. 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. 
  2. 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. 
  3. Utilising other sources of water, such as water reuse, desalination and transfers. You can read more about these in our non-technical summary. 

 

WRMP24 April 2025 revision 


The demand forecast and preferred plan have been revised in alignment with the Price Review, to reflect the 2023/24 baseline out-turn values for properties, population, total demand, leakage, PCC and non-household demand. Our preferred WRMP24 demand management plan was not altered for this revised output, maintaining all options as originally submitted. The resulting preferred plan projection shows minor differences with respect to overall total demand (DI) over the plan period, but reflects the lower PCC (household consumption) and higher leakage levels of 2023/24 (the new baseline). This also means revised projections for PCC (lower), leakage and non-household demand (higher).  


The latest revision shows an initial surplus compared to the previous report. This reflects the 'locked in' resource that cannot be utilised until the strategic pipeline is in service and the mitigative measures that have been undertaken, such as temporarily retaining groundwater licences. As this surplus is only available until 2029, it is unsuitable for addressing non-household demand and does not alter our decision to restrict new non-domestic requests.  

 

Annual Review

 

As part of our WRMP process, we have a statutory requirement to produce an annual review. This review provides an update on the delivery of our WRMP and highlights any changes that have occurred, all supported by an annual data return.

 

This is our final year of reporting against our previous plan, WRMP19. You can view our response to our regulators’ assessment of our latest annual review here.

 

For any further information on our plan, please contact wrmp24@anglianwater.co.uk.