Other stories from last week

(by Karma Loveday)

The High Court has granted River Action permission to proceed with a legal challenge against the Government over what the campaign group calls a failure to have or publish a special administration policy for water companies. The case will now proceed to a full hearing. River Action is pushing the Government to publish its policy, if it has one, or to produce and publish one if it does not. 

Yorkshire Water has appointed Dr Tony Ballance, chief strategy and regulation officer at Cadent Gas, and Basil Scarsella, chief executive of UK Power Networks, to its board as independent non-executive directors. The appointments follow a governance review and recent appointment of chair designate Jonathan Lewis.

South East Water customers in a number of areas had no water or low pressure for part of last week after a series of separate incidents. The biggest impact was to around 1,800 customers in the Benenden and Rolvenden area of Kent, which was caused by a technical issue at a water treatment works, teamed with low water levels in storage tanks.

Arup has made two senior appointments to its water team. Matt Walker has joined as UKIMEA water business growth director for water utilities. He is a chartered civil engineer with more than 27 years’ experience across the water and infrastructure sectors. Alastair Chisholm has joined from CIWEM as water policy, regulation and governance leader.

Utility Regulator has confirmed Northern Ireland (NI) Water’s 2027/28 allowed revenue and price limits, in line with its June consultation proposals. This is an extension year to the original price control (PC21) timetable of 2021-2027, to allow more time to prepare the next full review. The decisions are based on a roll-forward of the allowance set for the original final year of PC21 (2026/2027) to keep things as simple as possible, but also agreed NI Water's request for a change to cover payments on its capital financing, reflecting interest rate and inflation data. Total allowed revenue was £693m (nominal) for the 2027/2028 year, with an overall price limit K adjustment factor of 3.4% in real terms (before inflation).

Southern Water has reported success in its data sharing partnership with Thanet District Council. The council provided details of 5,250 low-income or on-benefits households, and Southern has automatically applied its ‘Essentials’ tariff, which provides a discount of at least 45%. The average household will save £346 a year, knocking a total of £1.8m off bills. 

The Scottish Government has issued a new direction requiring planning authorities to notify ministers of applications for new data centre developments exceeding 50MW. It said this will enable strategic monitoring of the pipeline of such planning applications and of the implications for wider infrastructure. Meanwhile, public finance minister Hannah Mary Goodlad has recalled a planning appeal relating to a proposed green data centre in Edinburgh. This means the appeal will be determined by ministers rather than an appointed reporter. Goodlad has also issued directions requiring Environmental Impact Assessments for proposed data centre locations in Fife and Edinburgh.

Environmental intelligence platform Planetary Minds has invited UK water companies to take part in a pilot programme that will allow them to submit one comprehensive real-world challenge to its governed intelligent debate platform, free of charge. The platform uses multiple specialist AI agents to debate a problem from different perspectives, interrogating available evidence and challenging assumptions rather than simply producing a single AI-generated answer. For water firms, this could include challenges around leakage, drought resilience, water demand, infrastructure investment, water resource management, environmental protection or long-term climate adaptation.

UKWIR has published two new reports: Optimising the selection of pipes for renewal to reduce leakage and Development of a water industry circular economy measurement framework with supporting metrics.