Between 2025 and 2030, water companies in England and Wales are set to spend a whopping £104bn – more than double what they spent in the last five-year asset management period (AMP).
This ramping up of spending in the latest AMP – AMP 8 – has been granted by water regulator Ofwat to improve the companies’ environmental performance and make their infrastructure more resilient to climate change and population growth. Much of the investment will go towards modernising ageing water infrastructure, including pipes, treatment plants and reservoirs.
Much of the funding will also be dedicated to reducing storm overflow spills, aiming to improve river and coastal water quality. Projects to improve water quality, reduce leakage and address climate change challenges like drought resilience, will be a key focus.
Despite this record spending, Ofwat has stipulated that customers’ water bills should only increase by an average of £31 per year, not including inflation. To work within these limits means the water companies will have to hit tough efficiency targets – and capital projects are under scrutiny to deliver more for less.
How can digital technology help?
“There are so many existing digital tools in the sector: people need improved awareness of which ones bring them the most value and benefit.”
Clare Taylor
Clare Taylor is the head of digital delivery for MWH Treatment, heading up the digital services across the operational side of the business. Her role covers 4D planning, visualisation and innovation. She is also the chair of BIM4Water. She says the new spending plans have given added impetus to water companies’ efforts to review the way and the extent to which they digitise their construction and maintenance operations, and, just as importantly, how they harness the data that comes from them.
“Digital technology in the water sector has the potential to overcome many of the challenges it faces – from water quality monitoring, leak detection via real-time sensors and metering, and reducing unplanned outages and maintenance through to predictive modelling and analytics, as well as using point cloud and photogrammetry capture,” says Taylor. “There are so many existing digital tools and technologies being employed in the sector that people need improved awareness of which ones bring them the most value and benefit.”
She adds that the real benefits come if data is shared across the sector. “This would not only bring benefits to the companies and the supply chain, but also consumers themselves.”
The role of BIM4Water is to provide a community of experts from across the water sector who can provide support, best practice and examples of how digital initiatives can be adopted and add value to the sector. The 2,000-strong group stretches across contractors, consultants, owner-operators and the supply chain.
Variable digital maturity
Taylor says the water sector has variable digital maturity across the landscape and is not as advanced as some higher-spending public sector clients like universities or hospitals. “There are pockets of great information and data exchange, or use of 4D or drones for production controls monitoring. But on the flipside, we have SMEs operating with paper-based risk assessment method statements, or clients requiring 2D outputs as part of the data drops for asset handover. So the water sector is only as advanced as its less mature pack members, and this is where we hope the Information Management Initiative will create the disruption required to finally bring everyone to equal maturity.”
Making a career in water
u003cstrongu003eTaylor has chaired BIM4Water for the past two and half years and has been a driving force for the group since joining the sector after completing a Master’s degree in 2020.u003c/strongu003ernrnu003cstrongu003eShe says that seeing the opportunities and career satisfaction available to her father cemented her desire to pursue a career in water. He worked for Severn Trent Water, before concluding his career in Qatar as a country manager for Veolia. u003c/strongu003ernrnu003cstrongu003eUnsure of what specific sector area and discipline she wanted to specialise in, Taylor carried out work experience in Albania during her civil engineering degree. She saw first-hand the transformative impact water can have on communities.u003c/strongu003ernrnu003cstrongu003e“We installed water pumps for disconnected villages, removed poorly installed and illegal connections and ensured continuity of drinking water supply for cities across the country,” she says. u003c/strongu003ernrnu003cstrongu003e“I completed my Master’s in water resources technology and management with a dissertation on harnessing renewable energy from mine water treatment sites. Over the next couple of years, I worked in several areas within the sector before joining MWH Treatment in 2020.”u003c/strongu003e
To underline her point, Taylor adds: “We often have to start from fundamental data when it comes to underground assets due to uncharted or documented buried services from our clients, which means, as contractors, we’re having to start from scratch doing our investigations when we do a project, and that means there are inefficiencies.
“As contractors, we use a great deal of digital technology, such as surveying and scanning, capturing point cloud data and creating a mesh of the existing assets. And we build 3D models as a bare minimum for all projects, rehearsing construction methodologies in 4D before we start on site. We use various field management tools (Pix4D, OpenSpace, Hilti, Nialli and BIM360 Field) on site and federate, collate and optimise the asset data to handover to the client.
“But what we often encounter is a client who is unable to adopt and look after that data because of their level of maturity. That means we must cut back the level of detail of information, and then hand that data back to the client.”
Speed and scale
She adds: “We are seeing a huge shift whereby owner-operators are recognising the need to be a capable client, able to bridge and adopt data and information exchange from capital delivery partners. This is where the united efficiencies and benefit to the sector will be realised.
“For AMP8, it’s very much about moving at speed and scale, but resources and skilled people are in short supply. We are already competing with projects like Hinkley Point C and HS2 for them. So it's about delivering projects more efficiently and making sure the right people have the right data at the right time at their fingertips.”
Embracing change
One notable exemplar project is MWH’s digital strategy on the Thames Gateway (Desalination) Recovery Project, which facilitated collaboration and stakeholder engagement. Its achievements were recognised across the sector when it won the Digital Innovation in Design category at the Digital Construction Awards in 2022.
MWH Treatment was part of the SMB joint venture with Skanska and Balfour Beatty contracted by Thames Water to work on this project at the UK’s only desalination plant. The JV was tasked with making health and safety improvements, optimising maintenance procedures and consumable storage, and creating further efficiencies across the desalination process as part of a £23m investment.
“For AMP8, it’s very much about moving at speed and scale, but resources and skilled people are in short supply. We are already competing with projects like Hinkley Point C and HS2 for them.”
Clare Taylor
MWH was also part of the team at another celebrated project. United Utilities and Advance Plus (a joint venture between MWH Treatment, Stantec and J Murphy & Sons) won the Digital Collaboration of the Year award.
The team faced a significant challenge to deliver a £145m capital investment project in 33 months at Oswestry Water Treatment Works, while maintaining a live existing site with uninterrupted supply to United Utilities’ customers.
Taylor also highlights the work of Anglian Water, which is collaborating with suppliers to harness smart systems to develop the first autonomous water network by installing condition-based monitoring (CBM) sensors on its pumping assets.
The CBM programme will use temperature, vibration, and electronic signature analysis (ESA) sensors to monitor the condition of rotating and pumping assets and optimise asset performance. This will allow the company to move towards a more proactive, condition-based approach to maintenance – constantly monitoring the health, performance and efficiency of its assets to carry out pre-emptive work when needed to avoid costly repairs and extend asset life.
CBM seeks to better predict and manage vulnerabilities in water and wastewater systems, such as leakage or blockages, through increased automation.
Innovation drive
Taylor says she is encouraged that Ofwat supports an Innovation Fund, promoting water companies to work with their supporting supply chain and contractors to provide solutions to common challenges facing the sector. “Their one challenge to the teams is that this must be scalable across the UK and not limited to a catchment or one water company, and that has to be a good thing,” she says.
BIM4Water hosted an event in the summer, called ‘Unleashing the Power of Water Data for Public Good’, to capture how all the live initiatives in the water sector integrate with other sectors like the Geospatial Commission, energy and telecommunications to create an evolving ‘knowledge graph’. Taylor describes how “this will enable us to define our future growth, thus ensuring as a sector we can deliver with excellence against the challenges being faced”.
Top of the agenda at the event were the development of a national digital twin, data frameworks and strategies for data sharing, as well as how to get water companies and their suppliers on board with data sharing.
For Taylor, the major focus of BIM4Water is interoperability and getting the tools and technologies talking to each other through standardised data formatting. The question of AI and its role in the sector, she says, will be minimal until the library of data that it needs to work on is in better order and the sector becomes less risk-averse. “Until then, the potential impact of AI will remain limited,” she notes.
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