Ofwat ups accelerated infrastructure spend to £2.2bn

Ofwat has approved the advancement of an additional £600m of investment in its final decisions on accelerating infrastructure delivery ahead of PR24.

It has approved work to start on 33 schemes over the next two financial years, valued at £2.2bn, up from the £1.6bn consulted on in April. All projects set out in the April draft have been given the go-ahead, with the main changes as follows:

• the North Suffolk Winter Storage and Lowestoft reuse schemes for the Essex and Suffolk area have been accelerated, given their linkages to the Suffolk Strategic Network and Storage pipelines scheme, which Ofwat previously proposed to approve;

• updates to the cost of two United Utilities storm overflow schemes, following additional information from the company;

• the cost of Portsmouth Water's accelerated universal smart metering programme has been reduced from £120m to £64m;

• following a request from Southern Water, the scope of its storm overflow scheme has been amended so that it removes at least 420 spills a year (down from 600 spills a year); and

• Ofwat has made some technical amendments to price control deliverables to improve the customer protections in relation to delivery.

The accelerated programme will deliver:

• ten schemes worth close to £1.7bn to reduce overflow spills by around 10,000 per year including work to improve water quality at the bathing water site at Ilkley on the River Wharfe and significantly reduce spills into Lake Windermere;

• the installation of 462,000 smart meters across seven schemes, which will help to increase drought resilience; and

• six water supply schemes which will provide an additional 75Ml/d of water once completed and protect a maximum of 31Ml/d of peak output.

Three nutrient neutrality schemes worth £160m that will protect natural ecosystems and enable the development of up to 82,500 homes.