Resilience, clarity and reassurance in the water sector

Photo source: South West Water

Increasing resilience is one of several challenges facing the water industry highlighted by Caroline Spelman in her recent keynote speech to Water UK’s annual city conference. It is clear the recent water shortages in Northern Ireland and the floods in Cornwall last autumn have raised awareness of the issues.

Underlying this is the more difficult issue of how to ensure affordability. Here there is no easy answer. Public disquiet over the cost of water is increasing especially in the South West where water bills are highest.  Increasing resilience and improving sustainability is expensive. The answer has to be innovation, thinking outside of the traditional boundaries to find new solutions.

One of the keys is to think about root causes and the old but still very valid adage “prevention rather than cure”. Here the pioneering work of Philip Crosby in his book “Quality is Free” and the philosophy behind Total Quality Management (TQM) can still offer much to the water industry.

A good example of this thinking being applied is the pioneering work done by several water companies on abstraction and catchment management for example, South West Water’s Upstream project. Stopping pollutants getting into our rivers, perhaps by working with farmers to avoid the use of fertilizers close to river banks or restoring dried out peat so that it acts as a sponge to absorb pollutants can be a lot cheaper than massive downstream investment to remove the pollutants from our rivers. A lot more thinking like this is needed in the water industry to find affordable solutions to the twin challenges of rising demand and increasing variability in our climate.