Speaking at a Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) event this morning, the regulator’s director of parliamentary and public affairs Nicci Russell said that by keeping the definition broad and open to interpretation it allows the water companies to meet their own relevant needs.
She said that resilience has a “broad scope” and covers a number of issues and that the is leaving it open to interpretation for each of the water companies so that they can meet their what their customers tell them they see as resilience.
Russell said that Ofwat has built this into the draft determinations – and final determinations when they are published on Friday – by linking rewards and penalties to outcomes.
This, she told delegates, allows the companies the ability to innovate and meet the criteria of resilience set out by each water company’s customer base.
Russell added that the shift to away from capital expenditure and operational expenditure to a total expenditure regime will help the companies to build up their network and environmental resilience, whilst avoiding a “capex bonanza”.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affair’s water reform team’s Holly Yates added that resilience is “absolutely geographically specific and there are different challenges in different places and people will go about dealing with it in different ways”.
She added: “Resilience is not an answer, its not a tick in a box, its a spectrum.”