Drainage and Wastewater Management Plan 2023

The DWMP is a long-term planning study which looks at drainage and sewerage needs over the next 25 years. The Plan looks at future trends and embeds an approach of working together with others to investigate and identify options for the sustainable management of our wastewater services.

The Plan assesses the level of risk we face from climate change, urban development, and a changing population. It looks 25 years into the future, as a minimum, with the current Plan covering how we will deal with challenges between 2025 to 2050.

We have produced the Plan and two summaries:

• The Plan
• The Non-Technical Summary
• Technical Summary

All DWMP documents have been approved through the DWMP’s internal governance and assurance process. This follows a series of review and sign-off steps shown below:

Welsh Water’s challenge groups are made up of experts from Welsh Water and other organisations. This allows us to get views from customers and those who plan and manage infrastructure, flood risk and the water environment. These groups are existing forums and part of our wider governance.

All documents were approved at each stage, with final sign-off by the Glas Cymru Board.

This is shown in the Board Assurance Statement.

The Plan is customer driven; we consulted with you on our draft Plan from July to October 2022. Your feedback is being used to shape the final DWMP and how we plan to achieve our end goals to benefit customers and the environment in an affordable way.

The Statement of Response provides information on our stakeholder consultation and the responses we received. The consultation findings provided us with lots of valuable information on how we can make the Plan easier to understand, whilst also helping us shape and develop future versions.

We have combined our Welsh Water 2050 strategic responses, national planning objectives and feedback from customers and stakeholders into three high level planning themes:

• Water quantity - Reducing the risk of flooding to communities
• Water quality - Improving water quality for the environment
• Resilience and maintenance - Making sure we can adapt to changes in the future, whilst also maintaining important services and protecting the environment

Our overall goal is to ensure that we can achieve the expected level of service in the areas we operate.

This means we will work towards the proposed Customer and Environmental destinations:

• Customer Destination – This is a time in the future when customers will not have flooding from sewage inside their home due to a lack of sewer network capacity.
• Environmental Destination – This is a time in the future when our rivers and coastal waters receive treated flows from a sewerage system only when this is necessary to protect their biodiversity and ecology.

We have proposed the following stages to achieve our environmental and customer destinations:

1. We start with the worst problems and focus on fixing them first.
2. We then move onto the ‘next worst’ problems until the point at which we have addressed all the identified problems.

Details of the six national planning objectives, and the DWMP action plan, can be found in the Strategic Context document. You can access the stakeholder version here and the customer version here.

We have looked at current and future risks, their causes, and identified areas where we want to work with our stakeholders.

The DWMP process has allowed us to look at the consequences of increasing rainfall and sewage now, and in the future. We can also look at the risk of flooding and pollution, and how this will increase over time causing capacity issues.

To find out more about collaborative working, please download our ‘Where we want to work with you’ document, which details our vision for future joint working.

This focused on the development of solutions to address risks, uncertainty, and objectives. We have looked at the following as part of the option development process:

• Scope
• Cost
• Timing
• Benefits

Overall, our approach looks at different options in terms of:

• Their cost
• The likely impact on flooding and pollution
• Wider benefits for people, nature, and the environment

We have worked closely with our customer challenge group, and independent environmental advisory group, as part of this process.

We take the preferred solutions and look at different programmes and timescales to implement them.

We bring all the best value options together into a Plan over time. We take the preferred solutions and look at when risks are likely to happen. We can then create a programme of work which looks to address the current risks first, followed by those that bring greater environmental and social benefit.

The short-term programme is then packaged up and presented to our financial regulator for assessment. More detail can be found in our latest business plan.

We have summarised the information within the plan into 13 reports. These include the risks and options specific to that area.

Within each report, the information has been broken down further into tactical planning areas. You can use the links below to access the area summaries for where you are:

We have embedded the principles of the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and Habitat Regulation Assessment (HRA) early in the Plan development process.

Only those options which have a positive impact on the environment have been taken forward for consideration in our Plan.

Those identified with possible negative impacts are reviewed again to understand whether the solutions can be adjusted and, if not, an alternative solution is put forward.

These schemes then make up the first DWMP programme of work.

You can access the SEA and HRA documents at the links below:

• Download Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA)
• Download the Post Adoption Statement
• Download the Habitats Regulations Assessment (HRA)

We have been updating our stakeholders and customers at every stage of the Plan:

1. Strategic Context
2. Risk Assessment
3. Options Development
4. Programme Appraisal
5. Consultation

We are continuing our work with stakeholders and customers to:

• Review progress against the Plan
• Develop the next version of the Plan
• Deliver options

We are developing joint working groups made up of Strategic Management Forums, Programme Boards and Community Project Boards. These help us to identify, plan, fund and execute DWMP projects.

E-learning

We’ve put together an e-learning tool which will help you learn more about the DWMP in a fun and interactive way. We want to give you enough information so that you can contribute to the Plan (now and in the future) and the development of solutions.

You can find our e-learning site here, where you can learn more about:

• What the DWMP is
• The history of drainage and wastewater management
• Future challenges
• How to get involved in shaping the DWMP