Between 2025 and 2030, water companies across England and Wales will deliver a £104 billion expenditure programme aimed at accelerating improvements to river and sea water quality and securing long-term drinking water supplies. Clear Waters aims to help customers and stakeholders easily understand what environmental benefits this substantial programme will deliver and to ensure progress can be tracked effectively.
What is Clear Waters?
Clear Waters is a collaborative project that brings together environmental groups, regulators, local authorities, the water sector and consumer representatives around a shared vision for improved transparency. We’re working together to develop a roadmap that will give customers and stakeholders clear, easy-to-access and understand information about the environmental improvements being delivered through water companies’ investment.
This partnership approach reflects our commitment to working collaboratively to address the transparency concerns raised by environmental groups during the 2024 Price Review (PR24) and comments made in the Independent Water Commission’s final report. Rather than working in isolation, we believe that bringing diverse voices together will help us create solutions that truly serve the needs of customers and communities.
Who’s involved?
Clear Waters brings together organisations from across the water and environmental sectors. Our partners include:
- Regulators: Ofwat, the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales and Natural England
- Consumer representatives: Consumer Council for Water
- Environmental groups: Blueprint for Water and Wales Environment Link
- Local government: ADEPT (Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport) and the Welsh Local Government Association
- Water sector representatives
This diverse partnership ensures we’re hearing from key voices that need to be part of the conversation about environmental transparency and holding water companies to account on delivery.
Understanding what matters to you
As part of our collaborative approach, we’re currently collating data and insights from stakeholders across the water and environmental sectors to help inform our work.
We’re gathering views on what information is most important to different groups, how people would like to access environmental data, and what barriers currently exist to getting the information they need. We’ll work with our project partners to provide regular updates on progress.
Together, we can create a future where customers and stakeholders have the information they need to see and understand the environmental benefits of water company investment.