We were commissioned by the Environment Agency to develop and design an Evaluation Framework for the delivery phase of the Asset Management Period Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP), 2025-2030 (price review 2024, PR24).
Water companies in the UK influence both water quality and the wider environment, and the WINEP sets out the water industry’s contribution to delivering the wider national objectives for the natural environment as set out in the government’s 25 Year Environment Plan, Water Framework Directive regulations, Environment Act targets, and Urban Waste Water Treatment Regulations.
The WINEP provides information to support water companies in meeting their statutory environmental obligations, non-statutory environmental requirements, and deliver against their statutory functions with respect to protecting and improving the water environment.
This research focuses on stage six of the WINEP process, the delivery of the WINEP actions by water companies and their partners to meet their obligations, how delivery is managed by water companies, the impact of actions on key environmental outcomes, and wider social and economic outcomes, together with understanding how the costs of delivering WINEP compare to the benefits of the actions.
Our report includes:
- A complexity analysis
- Stakeholder, funding and programme mapping
- A Theory of Change, outlining the inputs, activities, shorter- and longer-term outcomes and impacts of the programme
- A set of high-level evaluation questions for the process, impact, and value-for-money (VfM)
- An evaluation framework for the delivery stage of the PR24/AMP8 WINEP
- Cost estimates for applying the framework to the formal evaluation during 2025-2030
The framework was designed to act as a complete roadmap for conducting future evaluation and will be used to collect robust evidence to appraise the impact, process, and VfM of WINEP against intended targets.
This report, delivered by Eunomia, was the first phase and the base for the project we are currently working on, in partnership with ICF, delivering the multi-year evaluation of the WINEP 2025-2030 for the Environment Agency. The framework has been refined twice since the publication of this report.
