What’s next after a year of water sector reviews?

01 December 2025

It’s time to consider how to deliver solutions for the challenges facing the water sector – CIWEM’s A Fresh Water Future Conference 2025 has that target in its sights

Autumn is here, having brought with it some welcome rainfall to quench thirsty ground and rivers. Likely too, an uptick in storm overflow discharges. And we have a new secretary of state in the environment, food and rural affairs brief, in Emma Reynolds, who comes from the Treasury.

The inaugural A Fresh Water Future Conference in 2024 discussed the challenges faced by a range of organisations across the water sector. It explored how they might more effectively work together at meaningful scale to recover the health and resilience of our rivers, lakes and seas, with a view to feeding into the newly announced Cunliffe Review. This year’s event covers similar ground, but this time flipping the brief and reflecting on how to turn Sir Jon Cunliffe’s recommendations into tangible action that voters will notice by 2029 at the latest.

With several of the commission’s secretariat team in the room, in 2024 the message was clear: the system is broken and needs wholesale repair. Understanding how and where will be crucial. As Natalie Prosser, head of the Office for Environmental Protection said: “There is a suite of environmental law quite astonishing in its complexity and how it has accreted over time… I have been quite astonished by just how much it's not complied with.” Wildlife and Countryside Link’s chief executive Richard Benwell described a “culture of non-compliance" (CIWEM members can read an interview with him in the Winter 2025 issue of The Environment).

Mike Keil of the Consumer Council for Water (CCW) pointed to the issue of trust in the sector. He said that it’s at an all-time low and transparency had to be at the root of building it back, through improved compliance, visibility and appreciation of the extent of what water companies must deliver. Water UK’s Stuart Colville seconded this, saying, “Part of the route back to restoring trust is to own the problem, put out a plan, start delivering it, and be transparent about it, which bits are working, which bits aren't”.

But in CIWEM circles we never lose sight of the fact it’s not all about water companies. Martin Lines of the Nature Friendly Farming Network and Bella Murfin of the Country Land and Business Association both emphasised the role that agriculture had to play but also stressed the need for support for smaller farm businesses in the move towards a more regenerative model.

Urban resilience and planning is the other important piece of the jigsaw, with Emma Howard Boyd starkly warning that our urban infrastructure just isn’t fit for our climate future. Surface water management bridges the flooding and water pollution challenges and requires a greater emphasis in statute to drive the necessary performance improvements.

Unsurprisingly a big focus was the need to address all this as a system through a more coherent and compelling model of regional and catchment governance. Alongside this, the need to drive the use of nature-based solutions at scale. A shift from process-based towards more outcomes-based regulation, underpinned by a ‘nature-first’ hierarchy of approaches is needed, said Sustainability First’s Martin Hurst and Shaun Spiers of the Green Alliance. David Elliott of Ferns Natural Capital Strategy said, “Let's not make this too complicated. We must demonstrate that nature and community-based approaches can relieve an awful lot of the pressures on our catchments by attacking the broad range of issues why our rivers are not recovering, whilst precisely targeting our built infrastructure performance to get the biggest return across the two.”

The questions of deliver, deliver, deliver

Cunliffe’s review and recommendations covered all this ground and more. Sir Jon was clear that he had the easy job and that government had the far harder one of putting them into action. The prime minister has tried to switch focus onto “deliver, deliver, deliver” after a first year in office of what he has called ‘foundation building’. So too, Defra and the water industry. How to make change happen and translate into something noticeable on the ground?

The questions then, for A Fresh Water Future in 2025 are these:

On review and reform, what must be done to achieve a tangible difference the public will see, in an acceptable timeframe? What needs legislation and what doesn’t? What support does government need to build a viable model for the future out of the Cunliffe Review, and from whom?

On governance and accountability in water regulation, what does a new water regulator look like? What will it have to do and how can that be achieved most effectively? What powers should it have? What should ‘constrained discretion‘ mean in practice? And what should the new regulator do in its first 100 days?

If effective regional and catchment-based approaches are a crucial part of the jigsaw, how do we structure the regional system planner, so it functions effectively? How should the proposed national, regional and local approaches to planning and delivery work in practice? What level of independence is necessary? How can national policy objectives and local democratic accountability be balanced and address trade-offs? How can funding and finance be mobilised efficiently?

And what does a good catchment plan look like and how could it be enhanced? What can a strong catchment partnership achieve? What resource would that need?

Getting the right parties involved with these processes will be vital: putting all eggs in a water industry-shaped basket may seem politically attractive but it won’t recover our rivers if agriculture and urban runoff keep on polluting. So, who needs to collaborate across the water cycle? What will bring them to the table? How do we deliver more integrated solutions with multiple funders or investors at scale? What is the scale of the opportunity? What are the main challenges to overcome?

And then, without enough money in the right places, it’s all for nought. We can’t just rely on £100 billion-plus AMP rounds in the water industry to do it all. Blending, pooling and mobilising funding and finance to maximise delivery is crucial to delivering more for the money but easier said than done. How can this be finally made to happen, around multi-benefit, cross-sector water outcomes? What does government funding need to invest across multiple policy outcomes? What does private finance need to invest more into? Where are innovative things happening that could be built on by 2029?

Finally, because this all relies on a lot of different people who need to work together, with trust and confidence, how do we really restore legitimacy in the water sector through shared accountability? What are the behaviours and cultures, skills, capacity and data enablers to ensure effective policymaking, regulation, delivery and performance in the water sector over the coming years?

As in 2024 with the Cunliffe Review, A Fresh Water Future Conference 2025 comes at a pivotal time when government is actively thinking about how to make these things happen in practice.

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CIWEM’s A Fresh Water Future Conference 2025 took place on 02 December 2025 at 30 Euston Square, London. You can read 'A Fresh Water Future: 2025 update' for further information.

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Alastair Chisholm is director of policy at CIWEM