Drought plan
Droughts are natural events caused by a serious lack of rain over several months. Our drought plan sets out the actions we will take to protect water supplies should a drought occur.
Drought plans are updated every five years. We have been working to update our drought plan; and have published a series of draft plans since April 2021. Incorporating the feedback that we received from consultees, the Environment Agency and Defra we have arrived at our Final Drought Plan 2022. This replaces our former Final Drought 2018, and we are publishing our Final Drought Plan 2022 as our formally adopted plan.
During the development of our plan we implemented a new set of stochastic data. This ensures that our Drought Plan aligns with our Water Resources Management Plan. Using this data demonstrates that the North West is resilient to a 1 in 200 drought event with less than 0.5% annual chance of emergency drought orders. Earlier drafts indicated resilience to a 1 in 500 year drought event (or 0.2% annual chance) of emergency drought orders. Our Final Drought Plan has been updated to reflect this. Our Water Resources Management Plan is ensuring in the long term we will be resilient to a 1 in 500 year drought event.
We are also publishing a SEA Post Adoption Statement which describes; how environmental considerations have been integrated into the Final Drought Plan, how the Environmental Report has been taken into account, how responses to consultation have been taken into account, reasons for choosing the Final Drought Plan as adopted, and why other reasonable alternatives were rejected and the measures that are to be taken to monitor the significant environmental effects of implementation of the Final Drought Plan.
No information has been excluded from the Drought Plan on the grounds that it would be contrary to the interests of national security and no commercially sensitive information has been excluded.
Our Final Drought Plan 2022 and accompanying documents can be found below.
Paper copies are available at our head office.
No information has been excluded from the Drought Plan on the grounds that it would be contrary to the interests of national security and no commercially sensitive information has been excluded.
For reference, the Final Drought Plan 2018 can be found below.