Hello and welcome to our Get River Positive newsletter.

In March 2022 we launched Get River Positive – a firm commitment to making our region’s rivers the healthiest they can be. We committed that by 2030 no river in our region will not achieve good ecological status due to our operations (RNAGS), and a year in we’re pleased to share some excellent results.

We’re moving faster and further to improve river quality. According to current Environment Agency (EA) data, we currently account for 16% of RNAGS in our region and this number continues to reduce, with 100% of monitors installed on our storm overflows providing us with millions of data records every year about how our SOs are performing and our performance of 18 activations on average in 2022, means we are ahead of our plan to reach the regulatory target of 20 activations by 2025 and 10 activations by 2050.

However, the health of our region’s rivers is still affected by other sectors, and we want to help here too. According to the EA, the remaining 84% of RNAGS can be attributed to sectors, which is why we have committed to doing all we can to take leadership on many of the issues our region’s rivers face by supporting others to improve and care for rivers too.

We made the Get River Positive pledges a year ago because we want to be completely transparent about our progress as we continue to work to make our region’s rivers the healthiest they can be. With that in mind, I’m pleased to share our first Get River Positive annual report, which provides an update on the strong progress made to date.

We know that the health of our rivers is important to everyone. So we welcome feedback on our approach and look forward to updating you this year as the projects against each of the pledges progress.

Our Get River Positive commitments mean we’re going faster and further than any water company in Europe to ensure our operations cause no harm to rivers by 2030.

The Environment Agency recently released last years’ Event Duration Monitoring data, and has attributed the progress and improved performance, largely, to reduced rainfall during 2022. Whilst we acknowledge that rainfall across our region last year was lower than in 2021 (13% less rainfall than in 2021), and therefore a factor, this absolutely doesn’t reflect the investment and improvements we have made as part of our Get River Positive programme in reducing our impact on river health.

You can see all of the progress we have made in our Get River Positive Annual Report, below. Highlights include:

Completing our monitor installation programme for our sewer overflows a year ahead of the schedule. We have 100% of our storm overflows monitored electronically 24/7, with the data sent to our control room at least every 15 minutes.
Environment Agency data shows our RNAGS have reduced to 16% (from 24%) over the past 12 months, with the remaining 84% attributable to other sectors.
We have reduced storm overflow activations from an average of 27 times a year to 18 times. Whilst rainfall across the region was lower (13% less than in 2021), through improvements and investments in engineering – such as adding penstocks and adjusting weir heights to improve flow on our network - storm overflow activations have reduced by 26% compared to the previous year and duration reduced by 46% on average.
We were again this year one of a handful of water companies to be awarded the top Four-Star status by the Environment Agency.

Get River Positive annual report

Regards

Liv Garfield