Last week we covered CIWEM’s new report ‘River water quality and storm overflows – a systems approach to maximising improvement’. From that report, CIWEM director of policy Alastair Chisholm sets out ten big picture asks on overflows:

1. Water companies to deploy a hierarchy of catchment-wide measures to reduce storm overflows, prioritising nature-based solutions and active system management over underground storage.
2. Government to implement Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, including mandatory multifunctional SuDS standards, a conditional right to connect development to public sewers and a route to adoption and long-term maintenance.
3. Strong regulation by Ofwat and the Environment Agency for PR24 and beyond
4. Government to ban plastic in wet wipes
5. Government to review the barriers and feasibility to implementing area-based charging for surface water drainage
6. WaSCs and lead local flood authorities to hydraulically model key catchments to identify optimal opportunities to retrofit distributed SuDS
7. Government to review funding sources and rules to enable grant funding to be pooled and drawn down opportunistically over a period of time
8. WaSCs to create partnership funding pots for use with local authorities on retrofit SuDS schemes where flood risk is not the primary driver
9. Establish a legal duty on highways authorities to seek opportunities to manage highway runoff through SuDS when undertaking other infrastructure or renewal works
10. Local authorities to develop infrastructure coordination services to enable syncronised and coordinated delivery, including of SuDS.

The full version and further reading can be found here.