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Hello and welcome to our Get River Positive newsletter.
It’s safe to say that we’ve had a busy few months, from making great steps in further reducing our contributions to unhealthy rivers and creating more opportunities for everyone to enjoy our regions’ rivers, to funding our first Get River Positive Community Fund projects and welcoming our new Independent Advisory Panel - there’s plenty to update on.
However we also recognise that there’s still plenty more to be done, and our eye is firmly on the ball when it comes to continuing to hold ourselves to account and improving our performance.
Anyone who enjoyed the beautiful weather that we experienced this summer will know how important access to the great outdoors is for both our health and wellbeing. And within Severn Trent we’re as passionate as ever about the role we are playing in making our region’s rivers wonderful places for everyone to enjoy for generations to come.
Our hardworking teams are delivering some excellent results – this year we again received the highest four-star rating from the Environment Agency (one of only three companies to do so) – and we're moving faster and quicker, in some cases 20 years ahead, of targets set out by regulators to improve the quality of our region’s rivers.
So, read on to find out what we’ve been doing over the last few months.
Regards,
Liv Garfield
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Progress on our Severn Trent pledges
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Making our region’s rivers the healthiest they can be
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As part of Get River Positive, we’ve pledged that our operations will not be the reason for unhealthy rivers by 2030, based on Environment Agency (EA) measures called RNAGS (Reasons for Not Achieving Good Status).
Current data from the EA shows that water companies are responsible for 24% of RNAGS in England, while other sectors are responsible for the remaining 76%.
We’re really pleased to share the good news that we've made great progress in the last three months, reducing Severn Trent’s contribution to rivers in our region not achieving good environmental status to 18%. Furthermore we’re confident that by December this year we will reduce this further to 15%, this puts us ahead of plan on our aim to reach 0 reasons by 2030.
We’re also confident that we’re making year on year progress against our target of an average of 20 activations per year by 2025, however this measure is impacted by weather, and we won’t know how close we are to the target until we have analysed our data at year end.
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Pledge 2
Create more opportunities for everyone to enjoy our region’s rivers
The Bathing Rivers team have been making a splash!
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While we don’t own our region's rivers, we recognise that we have an important role to play in improving river health. Our £78m Bathing Rivers project involves improving over 50km of river and carrying out the industry’s largest monitoring programme, which will benefit the River Leam, Teme and Avon. The trial also reinforces our commitment to Get River Positive by ensuring 90% of people in the Midlands live within an hour’s drive of a bathing water site by 2030.
Read on to find out what’s been keeping the Bathing Rivers team busy this summer...
- In order to help us assess the current river health and give us a good baseline for river quality, the team has now successfully installed over 100 monitors on the rivers Leam and Teme. Data from these monitors will feed into our forecasting app, which, once developed, will be available to customers and local river users, enabling us to share river health information in an accessible way
- In September we announced we will be trialling the use of innovative ozone disinfection for wastewater – despite rivers in the Severn Trent region being the healthiest they have ever been, the trial of this pioneering technology will further help bolster our commitment to cause no harm to rivers by 2030.
- We’re continuing to talk about our plans with local stakeholders at roadshows in both Ludlow and Leamington, recently hosting events with Philip Dunne MP in Ludlow and Warwick District Council Leader Andrew Day, in Leamington.
Keeping in touch
We’ve just launched our virtual Bathing Rivers drop in space, the place to visit for all the latest news and stories – feel free to drop by!
More information on our bathing rivers project can be found here, or alternatively sign up to our bathing rivers newsletter here.
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Pledge 3
Support others to improve and care for rivers
Supporting our first Get River Positive Community Fund projects
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In addition to our existing Community Fund, launched in 2020, we’re incredibly excited to announce our Get River Positive Community Fund to support community groups and charities who are committed to making changes to improve the health of our region’s rivers.
We’ve already started supporting some brilliant projects, both in Mansfield and Matlock, that have a positive impact on our rivers and are working with our communities and our River Rangers to encourage more applications.
We’re really keen to hear about unique projects that stand out as having a real impact on improving the health of our region’s rivers. If you know of a great project idea that would help look after our rivers, please get in touch with the Community Fund team.
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Pledge 4
Enhance our rivers and create new habitats so wildlife can thrive
Engaging with community groups and organisations to care for our region’s rivers
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Engaging with community groups and organisations to care for our region’s rivers
Our Severn Trent River Rangers are a team of customer focused, environmental enthusiasts, who are fully embedded within our local communities with the shared goals of boosting river health and biodiversity along stretches of our region’s rivers.
Here’s a snippet of what they’ve been up to this year:
- Carried out over 1,000 riverside inspections - Conducting additional sampling and monitoring activities on the rivers, so we can understand the quality of rivers in our region more than ever before and, if needed, take any further action.
- Met with over with 50 river groups to date - Working closely with our partners, stakeholders and community groups to continue to build relationships as we all work towards the goal of making our region’s rivers the healthiest they can be.
- Continuing their proactive engagement work with customers to educate on sewer misuse and the environmental impacts putting the wrong things into the sewer network can have.
If you would like to ask our River Rangers a question or know of a river group that would like to engage with our Rangers, you can contact the team at riverrangers@severntrent.co.uk
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Pledge 5
Be open and transparent about our performance and our plans
Welcoming our brand new Get River Positive Advisory Panel
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One of our five key commitments is to be open and transparent about our performance and our plans and we believe forming an Advisory Panel will help us to achieve this and the other pledges we have made. The Panel will help oversee our progress against each commitment and ensure we maximise potential for outperformance across the Get River Positive campaign.
We’re absolutely delighted to announce our Get River Positive Advisory Panel. The Panel will consist of:
- Julia Casperd, Lecturer in Wildlife Conservation & Environment, Harper Adams University
- Matt Easter, Trent Rivers Trust
- Sarah Faulkner, National Farmers Union
- Ashley Jones, Swim England
- Joe Pimblett, Severn Rivers Trust
- Paul Wilkinson, Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust
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Follow us on social media for more updates on #GetRiverPositive and look out for our next quarterly newsletter in January!
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