Preserving and enhancing the natural environment for both our customers, future customers and ourselves is extremely important to us.
The Water Industry National Improvement Programme is focused on enhancing the natural environment and for this measure between 2020 and 2025 we must deliver 65 improvement schemes.
This measure tracks the completion of required schemes in each year, as per the latest WINEP programme published by Defra and kept as a live programme by the Environment Agency.
Each year we will record whether we have ‘met’ or ‘not met’ that deadline. This new target is for us to reach all our deadlines.
All WINEP schemes will be included including those reported under other performance targets.
The performance target will measure against the latest WINEP tracker in the year in which performance is being reported. Therefore, performance for 2021/22 is reported based on the latest WINEP programme on 31 March 2022 and the schemes which have been delivered by this date.
How have we performed?
The 2024/25 year has been reported as ‘Not Met’. This is because two schemes were not delivered, nor were they signed off by the Environment Agency. These two schemes were:
- Abstraction reductions related to our Itchel source – We have not been able to apply for an abstraction licence variation to reduce abstraction because of outages at other sources due to pollution incidents. We are putting in treatment solutions at these other sources and, once completed, these will enable us to take the abstraction reductions at Itchel.
- The requirement to switch off a raw water transfer between Darwell Reservoir and Hazards Green Water Treatment Works, due to the risk of transferring Invasive Non-Native Species (INNS). Building additional resilience into the infrastructure required to replace the raw water main has led to delays in delivery. We are working closely with our regulators to explore additional monitoring and mitigation to minimise the risk from invasive species posed by the raw water transfer until the replacement schemes can be completed.
Overall, for our bespoke WINEP ODI for the 2020/2025 period, we have delivered 58 schemes, with five schemes agreed to be extended into 2025/2026, and two schemes non-delivered (65 schemes in total).
