Our final Regional Water Resources Plan for the North of England.
Without action, the North of England faces a water shortage of over 600 million litres of water per day by 2050. The shortage is driven by growth in key sectors, ensuring existing water abstraction from the environment is sustainable in the context of future climate change, and an increasing population.
Our final Regional Water Resources Plan was published on Monday 16 June 2025. It sets out how we will ensure water supplies to households and business remain resilient and sustainable by:
- Outlining the water needs of the different sectors in our region.
- Forecasting water availability for public water supplies by taking into account climate change, improvements to drought resilience, and required sustainability reductions to abstractions.
- Confirming a best-value plan to meet the need of public water supplies whilst also ensuring benefits to the non-public water supply sectors.
- Providing an overview of existing work at a catchment scale.
Our plan builds on the draft Regional Plan (published in November 2022) by incorporating updated positions from member water company’s 2024 Water Resource Management Plans and considering feedback received as part of consultation on our draft Plan. It also integrates and aligns with further work to reconcile inter-regional transfer options within the plans of other Regional Water Resource groups.
Key drivers of our plan include:
- increasing drought resilience
- improving sustainability for the environment
- reducing long-term water usage by household customers and non-household businesses and leakage from water networks
- cutting down our reliance on drought permits and orders, and
- increasing supplies to those areas with a forecast shortage of water resources in part by utilising surplus water in other parts of our region.
Following the consultation on our draft Regional Plan, we reviewed all feedback received and published our Statement of Response on Friday 8 September 2023. This confirmed how we took account of each response and incorporated changes in our final Water Resources North Regional Plan.
Appendices to follow.