Our action plan for Windermere

We're committed to improving the health of water across the region, making the North West stronger, greener and healthier. Our work at Windermere, the beating heart of the Lake District National Park, is central to this approach.  

United Utilities has been working to protect and improve Windermere’s water quality for many years, taking responsibility for everything within our control and supporting others to act in any way they can to safeguard the lake for many generations to come.

We’ve been listening to what people have to say – and no-one wants to see sewage from storm overflows discharged into rivers. We get that and are up and running with an ambitious plan to tackle this and deliver the largest environmental improvement in the country. In Windermere, we’re going even further investing £200 million to help improve and protect water quality the lake.

Combined sewer overflows have been designed this way for many years and to avoid the risk of flooding of homes and businesses in heavy rainfall, so it will need a re-plumb of the drainage system across the North West, combined with introducing nature based solutions, such as reed beds, to achieve this.

This is similar to the switch from diesel to electric vehicles so it can’t happen overnight – but we remain committed to bringing about the improvements everyone wants to see so that we can all enjoy our region’s waterways. We will be doing more and sooner and read on to find out what we’ve done so far, the improvement that is delivering and what is coming next.

Taking wastewater treatment to the next level

We’re starting work to deliver a £200 million investment programme around Windermere which will reduce spills and improve treatment standards.

Find out more about our plans

We are still developing and building our approach to releasing open data. If you have any feedback or queries about a specific dataset available on this page, please email us at myview@uuplc.co.uk.

This data is licensed under CC BY, an open data licence, in order to make it freely available to other potential customers, stakeholders or interested organisations. Find out more about CC BY here.