Protecting our wonderful water
Protecting our region's rivers
Rivers play a vital role in everything we do, that’s why we’re absolutely committed in protecting them.
Rivers not only help us supply our customers with wonderful water every day, but they’re also home to an abundance of much loved wildlife that thrive in them, from beavers, to trouts to otters to name just a few. So looking after them and making sure we’re not impacting them, is always a priority.
We already do a lot of amazing work, that involves working with landowners, farmers and other environmental partners, to make sure that there’s as little impact on the river as possible.
It’s through some of this work, that we’re proud to say we’re one of only a handful of companies to regularly achieve a 4* status from the Environment Agency. The highest accolade in the industry!
As a responsible business, we also want to make sure that the way we work doesn't negatively impact on our environment in any way. We have a number of key focuses such as; reducing how much water we take from the environment and preventing pollutions in our rivers.
With climate change and population growth giving the industry increasing challenges, we know we need to do more if we’re going to continue to keep our regions rivers happy, healthy and thriving.
Storm Overflows
Although storm overflows play a vital role in protecting our customers from experiencing flooding, we fully understand the concern around them, and the impact on our rivers.
In an ideal world, they wouldn’t exist, but they make up part of the sewer network that was created dating back to the Victorian era, so it’s important that we understand them, and do what we can to reduce their impact. We look after over 90,000km of pipes 2,954 storm overflows, so replacing such an extensive system would be very costly and disruptive for our customers. However we know it's important we do as much as we can, which is why investing in projects that.reduce the impact of storm overflows and create improved and sustinable solutions to replace them.
Why we use them
They’re used during periods of intense or prolonged rainfall, as storm water can overwhelm sewers. The overflows allow the excess water, to spill into a watercourse and so prevents it backing up and flooding homes, businesses, roads or other open spaces, which can be a terrible experience for anyone.
Although the majority of these spills are rainwater - which are all allowed and permitted and regulated by the Environment Agency - we’re absolutely committed in doing what we can to minimise what impact they may have.
To do this, we are:
- Investing £200m on top of the £355m already invested to reduce the impact from storm overflows.
- Working on nature based solutions to keep more storm water out of our sewers, such as the creation of urban wetlands and green basins that will allow water to drain away naturally.
- Working with over 9,000 farmers to stop chemicals from pesticides from entering our water sources (a main cause of river pollution).
- Continue with our huge sewer blockage and community education outreach programme to prevent sewer misuse.
- Installing thousands of sewer sensors to alert any issues, that may impact overflows.
- We’re increasing sewer capacity and storage to slow the flow of water during heavy rains, so overflows are less likely to be triggered.
- We will be installing more monitors and screens where possible across the network.
- We will be reviewing all of our storm overflows at our treatment works, to make sure they’re operating as they should.
Our Great Big Nature Boost
We’re embarking on one of the biggest nature projects across the UK, by boosting nature across 5000 hectares of land in the Severn Trent region by 2027 – in total that’s an area bigger than Gloucestershire! By doing this we’ll also be helping to deliver 1% of the government’s Nature Recovery Network of 500,000 hectares, as part of their 25 year Environment Plan.
We're very lucky to have a region that is blessed with rich, diverse and beautiful landscapes and habitats, which are a vital partner to our reservoirs, treatment works and many pipelines. Put simply, they capture, hold, clean, and carry your water until we need to take it. So, as you’d expect, we plan to look after these wonderful natural assets. Here’s a flavour of some of the things we’ll be doing as part of our environment commitments across our region:
- Planting over 1.3 million trees by 2030
- Supporting the growth of more wildflower meadows
- Restoring moorland
- Bog and peatland restoration
To do this we’re going to continue to work with some of the most distinguished partners to deliver a range of projects to support the water cycle, these include; RSPB, Woodland Trust, National Trust, Rivers Trust and Moors for the Future.
How we're helping to boost biodiversity across the region.
Supporting biodiversity at our reservoirs
We're committed to maintaining and protecting the status of SSSI* land in our region.
We have 21 rangers who take care and run our many visitor sites. Our rangers work with both volunteers and organisations like the RSPB and Wildlife Trust
to protect and nurture the wildlife that make their homes at our beautiful reservoirs and woodlands.
Our visitor sites provide not only provide us with the opportunity to engage with customers about the wonderful water we provide, they also allow us to give back
to the environment by enhancing and protecting important and rare wildlife species such as butterflies, water voles and tree sparrows.
*Sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) are protected by law to conserve their wildlife or geology.