January 2026
The financial settlement for the water industry for 2025-2030 is the largest ever for a five-year period. Funded up front by investors, this money is repaid via customer bills, so it is effectively customer money that is being spent. This money will go on the day-to-day costs of providing water supply and wastewater services, as well as the upgrades and new infrastructure needed to ensure that the sector’s impacts upon the environment can be minimised. Customers, along with environmental stakeholders, therefore rightly want to understand what that money means for the rivers, lakes, beaches and other wild places that we, and other species, enjoy and rely on.
When the environmental sector scrutinised the plans that companies had put forward for approval by their regulators, we found that it was more straightforward to see how much money was going to be spent on a particular task or issue, but less easy to understand what that might mean for nature. How many Sites of Special Scientific Interest (some of our most important sites for wildlife) will no longer be blighted by wastewater pollution? By how much will abstraction that damages chalk streams be reduced?
We discussed these frustrations with Ofwat, the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales and others, and saw our concerns reflected too in Sir Jon Cunliffe’s review of the water sector and water management.
As a result, the Clear Waters programme was born, aiming to improve the communication of environmental outcomes from water sector investment. We started by reviewing existing projects and publications to try to understand what information could most usefully be presented to aid customers and wider stakeholders in their scrutiny of company delivery. Comprehensive research by companies, the Consumer Council for Water and Ofwat means that there is a good understanding of the kinds of information customers want to receive, how, and from who. But there was less detail about the specific needs of environmental stakeholders.
To help fill this gap, we launched a survey of key stakeholders that might want or need environmental information about water company outcomes. The survey ran for a month over the autumn of 2025 and yielded helpful insights into what information the sector could look to provide.
Around half of those responding to the survey were environmental stakeholders, whilst other respondents were interested in environmental information in relation to delivering services or planning their own activities, such as local authorities, housebuilders and farming groups. Environmental stakeholders in particular identified that they were interested in information at a range of geographic scales – from catchment to company to nationwide – indicating that a GIS-based platform would be a helpful way of displaying information, allowing it to be viewed and analysed at a range of scales.
When asked about what environmental outcomes were most of interest, water quality metrics dominated across all stakeholder groups, whilst flood-related outcomes were also of interest to businesses, and carbon and climate metrics were significant for customers and regulators. Environmental stakeholders had the broadest range of needs, being interested in further aspects including ecological outcomes for habitats and species, water availability and abstraction volumes.
In terms of how stakeholders wanted to receive information, interactive maps were the most popular ask for sharing data, although nearly all respondents wanted the ability to access information through a range of media, including raw datasets, dashboards, infographics and reports. The preferred source for this information across all respondents was regulators, whilst many stakeholders felt that they could also help to disseminate information onwards to their own customers and contacts.
Some stakeholders identified specific metrics that they would be interested in seeing published, whilst others highlighted the need to ensure that in any reporting, there are clear links made from environmental spend to environmental outcomes.
There is also a need to make better use of info that is already available, including through better signposting, and improving consistency across companies so that outcomes can be compared across the sector.
Whilst the needs of environmental stakeholders in Wales were not significantly different to those in England, there is a real concern that transition to a new regulatory system following the Cunliffe Review could leave Wales further behind in developing the communication tools that stakeholders need. Wales has to wait for additional powers to be devolved by the UK Government, and for the Welsh election in May 2026, before a new Welsh Government can forge ahead with setting up a new regulatory system. This could delay investment in programmes, monitoring and reporting outputs.
In all, key learnings from the survey include that stakeholders desire centralised and accessible data platforms, and regular and transparent reporting. They want to understand not just how much money is being spent, but what that money is delivering for the environment, and that delivering this transparency could be significant in rebuilding trust in water companies and confidence in the plans that they have set out. Government’s water white paper, published earlier this month and setting out how some of Sir Jon Cunliffe’s recommendations will be delivered in England, acknowledges this need, noting that a key purpose of a new water regulator in England will be to provide “greater transparency for the public”. Similar aspirations from Welsh Government are expected to be set out in a forthcoming Green Paper.
As environmental stakeholders, we look forward to continuing to collaborate with Clear Waters partners to deliver against all of these ambitions, and to ensure equal progress across England and Wales.
You can read the the full stakeholder survey report here.
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