A renewed approach to price reviews that sees each AMP as a building block within 30 year plan has been proposed by Ofwat’s interim chief executive to drive and deliver change.
Setting out key points to transformation, he said the long term and adaptive approach to water resource planning could be replicated for price reviews to stop viewing each five-year cycle in isolation.
“Too often the sector seems to start afresh at a price review,” he said. “We need to see the next five price reviews as incremental steps to deliver a 30-year plan. This is not to pretend that the future is certain, so planning needs to be adaptive, recognising both the value of delaying decisions to learn more and to take near-term decisions with long-term goals in mind.”
He added it must look beyond public water supply to other sectors.
Black said the water sector needs to see “mass scale consumer behavioural shift as part of addressing climate change” and suggested this could only be done by making the emotional connection between habits and the environment.
Community engagement and nature-based solutions must become “the mainstream approach that provide most of the solutions in the next ten years”. He suggested the emotional connection with nature should be encouraged to increase interactions with communities to make improvements to the places they love.
Black said smart networks and open data can be used to “harness the power of the fourth industrial revolution to operate and maintain networks intelligently”.
Furthermore, what he described as a “renewable energy revolution in wastewater” was needed to make better use of the valuable resources that flow from the treatment process. He praised the advancements made by some companies but feels “there is much further to go”.
He admitted that Ofwat had often “seen the environment as ‘extra’ on top of service to customers”, when it should have been centre to everything.