Anglian chief executive Peter Simpson has called for water – “our most precious resource” – to be central to the climate change debate, while shadow environment minister Luke Pollard urged the sector to “make more noise” to put it there.
Both were speaking at this year’s Waterwise conference, which was last year opened by James Bevan, head of the Environment Agency, with his now famous “jaws of death” speech.
Despite raising the profile of the issue, Bevan’s warning did not mobilise people into mass action or change and last week the Public Accounts Committee said shortages could be a reality within a decade.
“Years ago, we’d have tackled this problem with a traditional solution, such as building a new reservoir. We’d have delivered it well and efficiently, and it would have solved the problem, on the face of it,” Simpson said.
“Now we need to stop thinking in a fixed way about the future and move to a scenario-based approach, developing supply and demand-based strategies. It won’t always be raining in the north west of our region and dry in the south east – climate change is much more uncertain than that.”
The sector must think about potential future scenarios and develop strategies to tackle the most likely ones, Simpson said.
“My rallying call is to use the springboard of the recovery from Covid-19 to embrace water as a precious resource which is central to the climate emergency,” he said. “By being smarter, more integrated and even more collaborative we can rise to this, the greatest of challenges, to do the right thing for our customers and the environment.”
Pollard agreed with the need for prominence but said the water industry is failing in not making water efficiency a political issue.
He stressed that the country is currently facing two crises – climate change and coronavirus – after which it will be neither “preferable nor possible to go back to normal”.
He said there was now a “huge window of opportunity” to seize the political agenda to make reducing water consumption as important as energy efficiency and said the sector should have “shouted loudly” ahead of last week’s economic update.
He called on the whole sector to share a simple, unified message that would be simple for everyone to understand and follow, such as reducing water personal capita consumption (PCC) to 100 litres a day, something Southern Water advocates.
This efficiency ambition was echoed by Waterwise’s managing director Nicci Russell who asked “how low can we go” on PCC. She said that in 60 years average consumption had doubled so urged everybody to be more ambitious.
“We have planned to halve leakage then we should aim to halve consumption as well,” Russell said.