A Fresh Water Future was launched in January 2024 as an independently-facilitated and co-created expert and public manifesto for the next UK government to recover the health and resilience of our rivers, streams, lakes and coastal waters through an ambitious yet achievable package of measures.

With a new administration now in place following July’s General Election, committed to cleaning up Britain’s rivers, lakes and seas, recovering nature and tackling climate change the focus must now shift onto how.

Central to A Fresh Water Future was the question of how to deliver the widest-ranging beneficial outcomes for people, nature and the economy as effectively and cost-efficiently as possible. The scale of the task is huge. The cost – but also the benefits of success – equally so. So the need for effective delivery is paramount.

Water companies will be put on special measures and their priorities recalibrated through their articles of association placing greater emphasis on customers and the environment. Their delivery programmes for 2025-2030 will be the biggest yet. Major infrastructure is to be fast-tracked. Housing delivered at greater scale. Farming and land use incentives and planning reviewed and updated.

All of these actions will impact on water health and resilience, and will play out at a catchment scale. So effective catchment planning, regulation and delivery will be crucial to unlocking the effectiveness and efficiency that make huge investment go as far as possible, offering the best value for money to bill payers and tax payers.

Maximising the use of multifunctional, community and nature-based solutions as part of this approach is a fundamental part of the picture but one of the most challenging to unlock.

A Fresh Water Future conference will bring the nation’s leading practitioners and thinkers together to look across water infrastructure, urban planning and development and farming and rural land management to unlock the answers and build consensus on how to practically support government’s ambition in this space.

Set across four main facilitated sessions the conference will understand:

• The nuance of the challenges;

• The needs of key water cycle actors to deliver their objectives;

• How we can regulate effectively for optimal water outcomes through catchment and nature-based solutions;

• Where and how this is already being done, and what we can take from this experience to enable the approach to be mainstreamed.

Who attends?

• Policymakers – government (Defra, MHCLG, DfT) with a view to priorities for the next government.
• Environmental agencies and regulators / arm’s length bodies. EA, Natural England, devolved nation agencies, Ofwat, Office for Environmental Protection.
• Water companies. Senior executives and planning leads, investors
• Local authorities / metro and regional administration organisations (e.g. GLA / GMCA)
• Land use and agriculture stakeholders – Wildlife NGOs, trade bodies, catchment delivery bodies
• Consultants and wider supply chains for the water sector
• Academics