09/06/10
Water UK publishes a joint water industry response to changing economic and environmental circumstances. Meeting Future Challenges, a blueprint for policy action calls for two years of reform to ensure another twenty years of improving customer service and environmental quality.
Blueprint 2010-2012
The blueprint shows how success to date can be a platform for change, and how regulation and competition can together stimulate innovative water management in the industry and related groups, including consumers.
The aim is to remove barriers to improvement of customer involvement, incentives to innovation and efficiency, one-size-fits-all regulation, and access to finance from capital markets.
The proposals include:
Environmental improvement
More measured pace in future with focus on what matters to customers
Customer involvement
Greater involvement in company plans and price-setting through a stronger consumer representative body
Competition
Removing barriers to competition through upstream water trading
Affordability
Establishing a consensus on social tariffs,
Protecting low-income customers by slowing down the pace at which existing cross-subsidies are unwound
Price signals
More use of price signals through flexible abstraction and discharge consents.
Challenges 2010-2030
In the next two decades, the UK water industry must overcome new challenges to its ability to provide water and sewerage services at the quality and price required by an advanced society in the 21st century.
These challenges are of a different order from those faced in the two decades since privatisation in 1990. They are:
• meeting threats from pollution to the high quality of tap water
• managing surface water, flooding and coastal erosion using natural processes where possible
• managing water resources to provide an affordable public supply without harming the environment
• reducing greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time meeting higher standards
• adapting the service to climate change by increasing the resilience of critical assets.
Water UK Chief Executive, Pamela Taylor, said:
"The industry has the experience and expertise to be as successful in overcoming the new challenges as in dealing with the massive problems it faced in the 1990s.
"We are in a good position to move forward and the credit goes to policy-makers and regulators as well as management. But now we need a fresh approach.
"The companies will be held back if the assumptions on which policy has been based don’t evolve to meet very different challenges. They have come together to make the case for change in the next two years that will equip them for the next twenty.
"The blueprint is ambitious but realistic. It will help improve the industry’s performance without putting at risk its achievements. We are pleased that early discussions with the Environment Agency on flexible consents and the Consumer Council for Water on customer involvement have been very positive.
"We hope that ministers will respond positively to our proposals and re-set the policy compass for a strong water service, satisfied customers and a healthy environment.”
Meeting Future Challenges - a blueprint for policy action
For more information please contact:
Water UK Communication
020 7344 1809 (out of hours 07833 450544)
