Enabling sustainable economic and housing growth is a top priority, alongside working with others to achieve significant improvement in ecological quality across our catchments.

We continue to control our impact on watercourses by treating final effluent to a high standard in line with increasingly stringent consents. Where population and economic growth leads to additional biological loading, we expand or optimise our treatment processes to cope with this. Each of our water recycling centres (WRC) have environmental permits which regulates how they are managed and the quality of the flow that enters the receiving water courses. Our WRCs are designed to reflect population increase and we therefore monitor growth, and the impact of growth, very closely.

In March 2022, Natural England designated the River Wensum and the Norfolk Broads, a Special Area of Conservation, as having reached their nutrient budgets. This means they are unable to accept any additional nutrient load from new housing developments. There are currently thousands of properties and planned developments that the Norfolk Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) are unable to progress until the situation is resolved.

We have been working with Government and other nutrient dischargers in the catchments that feed these areas to develop plans to reduce the load in the rivers so we can unlock the development sites.
In September, we met with Defra officials to explain the options and then put forward a package of measures, to accelerate infrastructure funding to construct nutrient removal at three of the sites identified as discharging into the Broads. These schemes would create significant headroom in the nutrient budget and enable Norfolk County Council to approve many of the developments currently on hold – approximately 15,000 homes. This will not only deliver environmental improvement in a nationally significant ecological habitat but will also retain thousands of jobs and economic growth locally – in line with our Purpose.

The outcome of this accelerated infrastructure plan is imminent. In March, we also began a catchment scale pilot to inform the future approach for Nutrient Neutrality, which will be submitted to Defra in May 2023.