Love every drop

On Friday, I was invited to partake in an event hosted by Anglian Water called the 'South Midlands Growth Forum' over in Colworth Park just north of Bedford. And despite its title, it was an enormously intriguing and educational morning. I will try to summarise some the thoughts I was left with.

Stewart Patience and I spent an intense half an hour over a cup a coffee and a bun at the beginning of the day before the formal started. He introduced me to the concept of Long Term Water Resilience. In our region, we have the dual challenge of being mostly a fairly flat part of the country and a lot less rainfall than other parts (such as the North West). This means we have to be planning now for a future where their may not be enough water to go around.

So how do we do this? (I emphasise 'we' since that was the main theme of the event: how can Anglian Water work with other stakeholders to manage the water supply and management of the waste better?) The other stakeholders include the planning authorities, strategic planning authorities, the Environment Agency, housing developers, third sector landscape partnerships and others.

But back to my conversation (or tutorial in fact!) with Stewart who works to ensure good linkages between Anglian Water's systems and plans and the local plans being developed by the likes of Aylesbury Vale District Council and indeed Buckingham Town Council. Some of the key tasks ahead include how to trap and use more 'grey water' (rainwater to you and me). Anglian Water are now offering something of deal with housing developers whereby if they promise to install grey water management into their new houses and also domestic taps that use less water, then Anglian Water will reduce the connection fees for a new estate.

We also talked about sewage too and how Anglian Water negotiate and plan improvements in these systems. There is some bewildering complexities to be engineered in concerning storm water and foul water and how it is vital to keep some of these separate or risk flooding of the kinds that none of want to see!

The rest of the day was a very pleasing blur of information and ideas from lots of quarters concerning how water could be better managed and planned for coupled with the powerful idea that we all need to be even more focused on building communities rather than estates... And these communities include water environments that benefit wildlife, plants and trees too.

All of this will become increasingly important if the recommendations of the National Infrastructure Commission and the idea of the Oxford Cambridge Arc (or is that Ark?) move forward at a pace...

You can read the whole report here. And this one will become important for the Town Council once we embark on refreshing the Neighbourhood Plan.

Final thought: we forget how precious and miraculous water is at our peril...