Water Resources Management Plan 2024

Our Final Water Resource Management Plan 2024 delivers:

• A best value plan offering flexible, low regret solutions providing environmental improvements and customer benefits to the North West. This plan has also been fully aligned to the latest Water Resources Planning Guideline (published in March 2023);
• A 50% reduction in leakage (from a 2017/18 baseline), and reductions in water use to 110 litres per person per day, by 2050 (assuming full government support with building regulations changes, water labelling and metering);
• Plans to meet all the individual targets included in the Environmental Improvement Plan, including those related to business demand. Our revised assessments of the costs and benefits of non-household metering has resulted in an improved demand strategy for these customers, which includes replacing over 170,000 non-household meters (equivalent to 90% smart meter coverage by 2030);
• Reduced risk of temporary use bans to 1 in 40 years on average by 2031. Following changes to national water transfer needs we are targeting this performance solely through significant leakage and demand reduction;
• 1 in 500 year drought resilience by 2039, delivered mainly by planned leakage and demand reductions;
• Protecting the environment by planning for abstraction reductions where needed between now and 2050, whilst continuing thorough environmental investigations to assess and understand the impacts of abstractions.

We would like to clarify that this WRMP is based on demand forecasts made prior to the introduction of the new mandatory housing targets announced by the new Labour government in late 2024. In addition, the rapidly changing technology sector may also have a significant additional water demand, which was not available for consideration at the time of planning. With the significant increase in development now planned for the North West of England, it is important to note that this plan reflects the circumstances and data available at the time of its formulation. We acknowledge that future plans may deviate from this forecast to align with the updated housing and industrial targets and the evolving development landscape.

The following are the key documents that form our Final Water Resource Management Plan, which will come into effect in April 2025.

Some information has been excluded from the Water Resources Management Plan, such as details of the connectivity of our system, or specific details on our abstraction, on the grounds that it would be contrary to the interests of national security. Some commercially sensitive information has also been excluded.

We published our draft Water Resources Management Plan for consultation in December 2022. This consultation was open for 14 weeks and closed on the 15^th March 2023. Following consultation we took account of the feedback we received and published our Statement of Response. We subsequently received a request for further information from Defra which we addressed in our "Further information in support of Statement of Response (WRMP24)" document. We continued to work with regulators in 2024 to discuss the changes reflected in our final WRMP24.