This Green Paper provided stakeholders with a unique opportunity to contribute towards the co-design of Water Reform in Wales.
While we welcomed Welsh Government’s recognition that Water Reform is required, to deliver the necessary outcomes it must reform more than the water industry. It must also deliver an outcome-based approach to ensure improvements are made on the ground.
We believe the primary failures with the current system are:
1. Lack of Enforcement and Regulation – across all parts of the water sector but particularly the water industry and agriculture
2. Lack of co-ordinated monitoring – we do not have an accurate picture of the state of our water environment
3. Failure of compliance with the Water Framework Directive and the Habitats Regulations primarily, a failure to ensure that legal requirements with respect to evidence and the identification of measures at waterbody level are met.
4. Lack of prioritised delivery at catchment level – current delivery is at best haphazard with no clear governance model and a lack of priorities at catchment level
5. A Periodic Review process that has been built around performance commitments to outputs and not outcomes
6. A lack of consistent consideration of climate change leading to the current and future resilience failures.
Water Reform in Wales needs to deliver:
An integrated, whole system, catchment-based approach to water management
Strategic coordination and delivery for nature by embedding a new governance structure for water
Reform of existing legislation to deliver alignment, stronger enforcement, and fairer regulation across sectors
Urgent, long term investment and planning to address climate change and infrastructure resilience.
Our full consultation response: