Our Head of Natural Economy, Yvonne Rees, reflects on 30 years as a consultant working on water and land governance, and highlights three key lessons the UK can learn from our previous approach to River Basin Planning.
Channel 4’s new programme, Dirty Business, and UK government publications, including the New Vision for Water and the review of the water sector (Cunliffe review), have sparked widespread discussion about how the UK water sector can improve. River Basin Planning, a legal framework that protects and improves the water environment, is part of this puzzle, and an area our Head of Natural Economy, Yvonne Rees, has worked in for many years. In this article, Yvonne highlights the lessons the sector can learn from previous approaches to River Basin Planning.
The New Vision for Water sets out a reformative framework, with many positives for Cross-Sectoral River Basin Planning including:
- Long-term planning with targets for 25 years, 10 years, and 5 years
- New Regional Water Systems Planning to join up water to other sectors and better connect catchment and regional plans
- More support for ‘pre-pipe’ solutions and multi-benefit nature-based solutions
- Doubling funding for catchment partnerships.
However, familiar challenges remain about how to turn big ambitions for water into delivery. Will sectoral reform be enough to address the challenges and bring about meaningful change? Will the Transition Plan address the lessons we’ve learnt on River Based Planning from the past?
Challenge 1: Long-term planning, realistic targets, and honest trade-offs, to show progress
In recent years, long-term planning has featured more prominently in UK environmental management, with the 25 Year Environment Plan, the Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP), and its 2025 target delivery plans. This positive step has clarified responsibilities and near-term expectations. It’s good to see this theme continue in the New Water Vision, with long term targets for 25 years and interim targets at 5 and 10 years. Having a long-term ambition to restore 75% of water bodies to good ecological status (GES) is a good thing, but it’s unrealistic to suggest that this will be achieved quickly or without major trade-offs.
The ambition needs to be combined with SMART targets (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound) linked to clear action to enable progress to be demonstrated. Whilst public concern about water quality persists, expectations are that environmental outcomes should improve alongside, and not in conflict with, growth, economic resilience, and food security.
Given that a core theme in the New Water Vision is building trust, a sense of honesty and realism about the targets, and the trade-offs, will be essential, for the general public and those working hard to achieve them, so that progress can be seen and efforts appreciated.
Improvement has to be a goal, but water faces considerable pressures driven by climate change, population growth, and housing demand. Horizon scanning to identify pressures and predict likely impacts would indicate the extent of action needed to ‘stay still’. Given the low status of some rivers in England, managing expectations needs to be part of the public conversation.
When setting water targets, we should be explicit about trade-offs, realistic about how success is defined, and focused on holistic, sustained improvement.
Challenge 2: The challenge of connecting water policy with other sectors
The New Water Vision seeks, amongst other things, to address the fragmented and misaligned planning systems that currently exist. The new Regional Water Planning Function outlined in the New Vision aims to fill the ‘missing middle’ and align national priorities with regional delivery, rationalising existing plans. Options to rationalise plans, such as River Basin Management Planning (RBMP), regional water resource groups, catchment partnerships, and Regional Flood and Coastal Committees, are being considered.
Over 25 years ago, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) 2000 mirrored these ambitions for joined-up decision-making in water governance, by requiring the development of RBMPs. The WFD offered an opportunity to create cohesive plans focussed on water and commit a range of delivery partners to joint action. In practice, however, RBMPs struggled to become the guiding documents they were intended to be, and, despite efforts, sustained, joined-up commitment to on-the-ground delivery has not been evident.
In part, this has been a problem of time and resources. The RBMP process began with complex analysis and detailed engagement, but tight deadlines squeezed processes early on and reduced the opportunity to strategically engage regional stakeholders in water governance decisions. Further demands for efficiency led to a loss of regional co-ordination and the River Basin District Liaison Panels were dissolved.
The proposed regional element of the New Water Vision brings a new opportunity to give momentum to this “missing middle”. But gaining buy-in from others with powers to enhance water status will be challenging. Any arrangements should ensure sufficient time and resources to allow relationships to develop fully; having statutory requirements or clear incentives to bring delivery partners to the table and commit to action would help. Guidance in the HarmoniCop Handbook, ‘Learning together to manage together’ on Positional Bargaining still provides relevant tips on gaining buy-in. Another recommendation would be to establish a Defra team with direct accountability for ensuring integration of cross-sector plans.
Effective collaboration requires an understanding of others’ objectives, and this means the water sector cannot always drive the agenda. Finding ways to influence the agenda of other stakeholders is vital to making progress. The catchment and river basin geographies differ from the geographies of most planning systems. The ability to flexibly interact with others’ geographies will be important.
At a local level, local authorities are well positioned to increase collaboration for environmental outcomes, as they control urban growth and are responsible for Local Nature Recovery Strategies. In a 2021 water governance study in the Northwest of England, we developed a Local Authority Plus model for water management, clustering catchment activity at the county level to enable fuller influence over the Nature Recovery Strategy and Flood Management.
In a similar vein, to encourage local authorities to engage, Eunomia was commissioned to create a toolkit signposting practical measures for planners to improve local water status. The toolkit facilitated communication between water management experts and the language and processes of local planning authorities. Time-saving communication tools such as this help cohesion across plans and sectors.
Standardising data sharing processes, reporting cycles, and engagement methods at every opportunity means partners can plan together once and deliver many times. Our research shows practical planning toolkits and codesigned processes that translate water goals into local planning actions foster collaboration between stakeholders.
Challenge 3: The disconnect between water and members of the public
Many European countries have maintained stronger connections between members of the public and water, possibly because local authorities retain roles in water management. In England, we removed the local authorities’ role in water in 1974 to create Regional Water Authorities and then increased centralisation when we created the National Rivers Authority in 1989.
The Environmental Improvement Plan recognises that everyone has a role to play in living more sustainably. The effective implementation of many preventative solutions encouraged in the New Water Vision, such as SuDS, water re-use, rainwater management, and reducing sewer misuse, will rely on behaviour change. Reconnecting people to water is essential.
The WFD, introduced in 2000, included a requirement to “encourage the active involvement of all interested parties”, widely interpreted as gaining public involvement. The regional River Basin District Liaison Panels were too high-level to do this, so more local level engagement was facilitated via Catchment Based Approach (CaBA). Many CaBA partnerships are now supporting better engagement, for example, through citizen science and volunteer schemes; however, the effectiveness of partnerships varies greatly, and more could be done. It is great to see the New Water Vision promise that funding for this area will double. Still the key is to give longer-term funding, for 5 years possibly, to stabilise leadership roles and enable more strategic delivery.
Local authorities could provide additional momentum by giving greater weight to local voices. Recent interest in wild swimming has brought new local attention to water quality, while flooding, access to nature, and place-based regeneration also shape people’s relationship with water. Local authorities sit at the intersection of these issues and are also responsible for development planning (a key mechanism for protecting water locally) and for public health (another sector the New Water Vision mentions for closer collaboration).
In recent years, new statutory responsibilities for flood risk management, and Local Nature Recovery Strategies have provided additional focus for local people. Local authorities are democratically accountable, embedded in place, and already connected to communities, yet many CaBA partnerships struggle to engage those with limited time and resources. Leveraging this connection could be pivotal to addressing problems at the source.
The bottom line is that structural reform alone will not deliver the improvements people expect and may initially distract from action as institutional changes settle in. What will make the difference is honest and realistic goals and targets, more transparent accountability, duties and incentives for coordination across sectors, and greater tie-up, particularly with local institutions, enabling stakeholders, including the general public, to work together and deliver lasting improvements that communities can see and enjoy.