The group, chaired by Waterwise managing director Jacob Tompkins, met for the first time on Friday and decided that resilience should mean water companies ensuring reliable supplies in whatever manner they see fit – rather than focussing on the resilience of their infrastructure.
This is a shift away from other definitions, such as by government, which focuses on infrastructure resilience, rather than supply resilience.
Speaking exclusively to Utility Week, Tompkins said: “It doesn’t matter what the input is, just what the output is. So it’s a very customer centric view of resilience.”
He added: “This means you could have a failure of infrastructure or a collapse like Enron, but you need to make sure the service carries on.”
Tompkins said this stance should not be seen as the taskforce promoting a water services based approach over an infrastructure and capital investment approach to resilience.
“Resilience isn’t about removing big infrastructure and moving towards service based models, it is about both,” he said.
The move echoes the new stance adopted by Ofwat in the PR14 price review process, and in its new strategy, that he focus should be on the outputs of the water companies.
Tompkins also stated that the resilience taskforce members do not want the regulator to prescribe what measures the water companies need to take to ensure resilient supplies, but to give them the freedom to decide which measures are the most suitable.