Planning for drought
Our resources are well managed and so, hopefully, we will never be in a drought. But we plan for it just in case.
Drought Plan 2022
The Drought Plan explains our operational approach to the management of water resources during periods of drought. We have a statutory duty to review and update our Drought Plan every five years. Our current Drought Plan was published in April 2022.
We carried out a five-week public consultation process during June 2021. Through this we asked our customers, stakeholders and regulators for their views on our draft Drought Plan. We produced a Statement of Response following that consultation, which set out how we took on board the comments received and used them to develop our revised Drought Plan 2022.
The Statement of Response and revised draft Drought Plan 2022 were submitted to the Secretary of State in September 2021 to determine whether our plan could be published. In April 2022, we were directed to publish our final Drought Plan and accompanying documents.
We genuinely appreciate the time taken by our customers, stakeholders and regulators in supporting the development of our Drought Plan 2022 and we welcome the positive contribution and direction that has helped us to refine our plan. All the comments and representations have been taken into consideration in developing our final Drought Plan 2022.
Some details have been redacted (excluded) from these documents on security droughts. Please find a statement below regarding this:
In order to maintain the security of the water we supply to our customers and in compliance with national security requirements as described in the Water Industry Act 1991 section s.37(B), some minor details have been removed (or "redacted") from the draft Drought Plan documents that we have published. The information we have redacted is mainly about site names (these are shown in our public consultation documents as site codes rather than site names), and we have also redacted a high-resolution map from the HRA document. Full details of these sites and maps are provided in the unredacted documents we share with our regulators, so that they receive all the information necessary for a detailed technical assessment of our plan. Because we want our customers to have the most complete information possible on our drought plan, we have tried to redact the minimum information necessary from the documents we have made available to the public. If, however, you find that this makes the plan difficult to understand, please do not hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to discuss the best way to resolve any questions you may have.