Changes to draft water resources plan
We’ve made changes to our Draft Water Resources Management Plan in response to feedback made during the public consultation held in 2008.
This has resulted in some changes:
- A significantly enlarged region-wide water efficiency programme as a result of new mandatory water efficiency targets recently introduced by Ofwat.
- A much larger predicted shortfall in water supplies in West Cumbria has resulted from the revised abstraction licence changes planned by the Environment Agency and revision of the water resources modelling approach. The strategy for West Cumbria now comprises a combination of leakage reduction, water efficiency activity and an enlarged new groundwater scheme at South Egremont.
- In the Integrated Water Resource Zone (which serves about 95% of the region) there is now no predicted water supply shortfall until 2022/23. Where we had previously proposed to carry out leakage reduction and water source enhancement in this zone during 2010 to 2020, no such schemes are required before 2022/23. These changes have resulted from: reduced allowance for climate change uncertainty; more explicit inclusion of the water supply benefit of the West-to-East Link; revised allowance for water source outage; inclusion of the enlarged water efficiency programme; and taking account of the scale of the recession.
- A new water pipeline is needed in Carlisle to reinforce the water supply network to maintain adequate supplies to areas of development. No other schemes are required to maintain adequate supply-demand balances in the Carlisle or North Eden water resource zones.
- We have included a new table which considers the probable needs for more water supply-demand actions in the future by taking into account issues we are unable to include in our main plan, such as the impact of the EU Water Framework Directive on leakage reduction.
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