WReN regional draft plan

Our Draft Regional Water Resources Plan for the North of England.

WReN published its draft Regional Water Resources Plan on Friday 18 November 2022.

This Plan incorporates updates undertaken following the publication of our Emerging Plan earlier this year including using the responses we received from a range of stakeholder to help shape in the development.

The draft plan provides information of the region’s water needs; reflecting growth, climate change and environmental destination and outlines the draft best value plan.

Key drivers of our plan include:

increasing drought resilience
improving sustainability for the environment
reducing long-term water usage and leakage
cutting down on drought permits and orders, and
increasing supplies.

Following the consultation on the draft Regional Plan, we have reviewed the feedback we received and published our Statement of Response on Friday 8 September 2023. This advises how we will take account of each response in our final Water Resources North Regional Plan which will be published alongside our constituent water companies’ final Water Resources Management Plans 2024 (WRMP24s) which is expected to be in late Autumn 2023. We would like to thank everyone who took part in the consultation.

In addition to the WReN draft Regional Plan Statement of Response, Yorkshire Water and Northumbrian Water have also published their draft WRMP24 Statement of Responses, aligned with the overall Regional Plan. Details of these and their revised draft WRMP24s can be found on the Yorkshire Water and Northumbrian Water websites.

Between publication of the draft Regional Plans and WRMPs and ahead of the publication of associated Statements of Responses, a further inter-regional reconciliation (Reconciliation 3) of all five of the regional group plans took place between March and May 2023 to confirm and re-align the position on the strategic transfer options. Two supporting reports are provided with our Statement of Response to present further detail on the outputs of this reconciliation (with rationale) and to provide a high-level overview of the approach being taken in the development of revisions to Regional Plans and WRMPs.