Leading voices: Steve Kaye

25 November 2024

The outgoing chief executive of UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR) on growing innovation in the water sector through a longer-term strategic approach to research, funding and regulation.

Steve Kaye wants the UK water sector to think more long term. Stepping down in November as chief executive of UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR), a role he took up following a nearly 30-year stint at Anglian Water, Kaye hopes he’s helped lay the ground for a more future-looking approach in the industry.

Starting with UKWIR itself: “When I joined the projects tended to be a bit more short-term,” Kaye says, talking to The Environment in the last few weeks of his tenure. “By setting more strategic goals, we've developed a short, medium and long-term programme that's more focused on the important things that we need to sort out in the industry.”

Steve Kaye © UKWIR

These include such varied areas as putting a stop to leakage and harmful sewer outflows, reducing freshwater abstractions and educating the public about lead control solutions.

There’s still a way to go as far as getting such an outlook embedded in the industry itself, however. “The challenge is getting our members to support longer-term research,” Kaye says.

Long-term thinking

He points to the success of the Chemicals Investigation Programme (CIP), a long-term project exploring the sources and pathways of chemicals, including PFAS, getting into rivers via wastewater treatment works. The first three phases of CIP (which ran from 2010 to 2022) carried a combined budget of £190 million, funded by the 10 water and wastewater companies in England and Wales. It produced 25 reports during that time, whose data has added hugely to the knowledge base of the sector, enabling it to better respond to the significant challenges of chemical pollutants. The budget is still being confirmed for the final phase of the project, CIP4, which will run over the next five years.

Under his tenure, UKWIR has secured access to more external funding, from the likes of the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), Environment Agency (EA), Defra, and research councils including the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council and Natural Environment Research Council. He gives an example of a project currently taking place with the universities of Sheffield and Glasgow to explore the impacts of adding chlorine to drinking water as a means of pathogen control.

European funding streams are available too, thanks to UKWIR’s connections with Water Europe (previously the Water Supply and Sanitation Technology Platform), an organisation that coordinates innovation among our nearest neighbours across the Channel. Getting hold of such funding (whether in Europe or at home in the UK) requires the water industry to think beyond its typical five-year funding windows, Kaye says: “We're getting by now, but we can't be just doing short-term, quick wins.”

Collaborate to innovate

As part of his push for longer-term strategic thinking at UKWIR, Kaye is proud of having fostered a culture of collaboration with the organisation’s membership, and beyond. “We've engaged more subject matter experts from the companies to guide us, design the programmes with us,” he says. He’s reached out to academia too, as well as to other sectors and to companies up and down the industry’s supply chains.

On a practical level, this approach has enabled access to some of the external funding described above, but it could also help to address a wider sectoral challenge. “The water industry still working in a silo,” explains Kaye. “The way we do research currently is about the water companies: water company service and assets.”

It’s a similar situation in terms of international collaboration. “Often in the UK, we tend to work on our own,” he says. But, look around the world, as UKWIR has been doing through its relationship with bodies like the Global Water Research Coalition (which has members in 10 countries including the UK), and “there's a lot of learning out there. What we can learn from countries who might be more experienced – at things like droughts in Australia?”

Regulation reform

He’d like to see the industry thinking more holistically, taking cues from work like CIWEM’s A Fresh Water Future report, whose recommendations included

introducing ambitious catchment system management that engage with stakeholders across food, farming, energy, nature, health, infrastructure and more. “We could do more joined up research,” says Kaye. “The water industry would be great, wouldn't it, if we were operated as a catchment and it was regulated as a catchment?”

The current system of regulation “doesn't really encourage collaborative work,” he believes. “Companies have been set up to compete. They can outperform each other, and they can be top of the league and get rewarded for that.” More join up of regulation across sectors would also be necessary if we want to achieve the holistic approach called for in A Fresh Water Future: “Energy, agriculture and water is the classic nexus but they're regulated completely separately. It needs regulation sitting above to make this happen.”

It's here that Kaye would like to see action from government, as well as creating incentives for longer-term investment. He’s glad to hear that environment secretary Steve Reid has ruled out renationalisation of the water industry: “I've worked in a nationalised industry in the seventies and eighties and it didn't work very well. It's got to be led by organisations that understand infrastructure and investment and do things efficiently.”

Not all bad news

As well as research, innovation and collaboration, Kaye feels that communication should be an increasingly important element of UKWIR’s remit. With the public – and the media on its behalf – aware of and concerned by issues relating to the water and environmental sector in a way not previously seen before, bodies like UKWIR have an opportunity to direct the narrative.

“We hide our light under a bushel – or we have done,” says Kaye. “When I joined the water industry, none of this was in the media. It's quite a recent conversation. Since things have blown up, we've not really been on the front foot, so we are trying to up our game. We need to be more proactive.”

That means sharing positive stories from the water industry, Kaye goes on, whether around the UK’s drinking water being tested to some of the strictest levels in the world (and passing over 99.95 per cent of those tests) or the rise in event duration monitoring on sewage outflows (100 per cent are monitored today, compared with 7 per cent in 2010).

“The current narrative is driven by emotive language, not by facts and scientific data. What we can do through UKWIR and research generally is provide real evidence to show how, you know, biodiversity in rivers has actually improved in some areas and pollution has decreased,” he says, citing a Defra-funded study from 2019 of the impacts of wastewater on the River Ray in Swindon over 40 years.

He’s pleased with how UKWIR has already involved in this regard but wants to go further. “Because of the way that the press operates, it's very easy to talk about raw sewage and executive pay, and it's less easy to talk about complex systems like sewerage. The trick is to make somehow make it exciting. Innovation is interesting! There's a smart way of doing that.”

There’s work to do, but Kaye feels optimistic about what the future holds for UKWIR under his successor. “We've got a great opportunity now,” he says. “There’s a new government, and we've got a fantastic platform for wider collaboration, and we can leverage more investment in research and innovation.”

Author: Jo Caird, The Environment editor

This article first appeared in the Winter 2024 print issue of The Environment. To gain access to the entire digital archive, and receive your hard copy of the magazine each quarter, become a CIWEM member.