WET News

PIPES & DRAINAGE 2019 5 September, and Defra has since been con- sulting on whether to make it compulsory for water and sewerage companies to each draw up their own DWMP. Mark Worsfold, director of asset manage- ment at South West Water and one of the Water UK leads on the 21st Century Drainage Programme, told the WWT Wastewater 2019 conference in January that DWMPs were still "in their infancy" and that there may still be issues to iron out. However, he said that he would favour making them a statutory requirement for the next price review in 2024 since the enact- ment of the legislation could then be delayed until the time was right. "It is appropriate for it to be statutory beyond PR24, because it will give all stake- holders a duty to be involved," he said. The DWMP framework – the result of 11 months' work starting in 2017 and subject to ongoing review – is intended to replace existing multi-stakeholder planning on drainage, which has adopted many different forms and was previously given 22 different names across the country. Trevor Bishop, the former director of strategy and planning at Ofwat and now a director of Water Resources South East, believes DWMPs have a valuable role to play, especially since drainage and wastewater requires more integration and 'systems thinking' than water resources. "I am not a believer that clean water has all the answers and it is just a case of trans- ferring the planning approaches across to wastewater," Bishop said. "I am glad the 21st Century Drainage Programme did not take that approach." Bishop argues that wastewater planning needs to be more local, is more complex in terms of the stakeholders involved and that there is less scope for large strategic projects to solve problems. Despite this, he feels there has been some "great leadership" on DWMPs from the wastewater sector, and that is reflected in how the approaches had been adopted by water companies in their current business plans when talking about resilience. "Resilience planning is different," Bishop said. "It is not just about systems, it is about collaboration, and as we go forward this will be the acid test." A key aspect of these plans is ensuring that, in Bishop's words, "better parity" is created between water and wastewater plans and that companies are giving due focus to a subject that can have ramifications far beyond the sector. To rise to the challenge, there will be a need for solutions that can deliver greater overall value, even if that comes at greater cost, and allow companies to keep the prob- lems in their network to a minimum. Nature-based solutions are likely to have an important role to play, including sustain- able urban drainage systems (SuDS). "SuDS have the opportunity to provide some great solutions to the problems we face," Wessex Water director of wastewater George Taylor said. "I've definitely seen the benefits they can have, including on the capacity of the network. There's more work to do but there are opportunities for sure." One of the major drivers of change in AMP7 and beyond is expected to come in the use of analytical technology, which could substantially expedite the sector's ability to identify problems and trends. Northumbrian Water, for example, is making a big commitment to 'digital twin' technology, which involves the creation of a virtual model of the real world to help under- stand whether homes and businesses are in danger of being flooded, or environments being polluted, and prioritise the appropri- ate response actions. By running simulations and looking at potential outcomes in both the short and long terms, the company hopes to be able to anticipate problems before they happen. Northumbrian has successfully experi- mented with a vast range of data initiatives to improve its wastewater performance, includ- ing using a machine-learning algorithm to analyse the CCTV footage of its sewer networks to detect anomalies such as tree root ingress, but the main issue the company hopes to solve is predicting where flooding is going to occur. Nigel Watson, Northumbrian Water Group director of information services, said: "We look at when the pipe last failed as well as the rain data and storms coming in. Put- ting those two bits of data together, we look at the hotspots in our network – which criti- cal assets are likely to fail. Based on that, we can do some predictive maintenance." Across the board, it appears the water and sewerage companies are looking at digi- tal technology as a core aspect of their efforts to deliver more for less going into the future. "We've probably got more data flowing through telemetry than ever before," Anglian Water director of regulation Alex Plant said. "I think the step change in PR19 will be the coming together of better analytics with the raw data."

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