Working with others – Isle of Wight catchment

• The Isle of Wight County Council
• The Environment Agency
• Natural England
• The Island Rivers Catchment Partnership and member organisations including:
  • The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust
  • Natural Enterprise
  • Solent Forum
  • The Country Landowners Association
  • National Farmers Union
  • Marine Management

Working together to co-create the DWMP is important. Our drainage and wastewater systems are often inter-connected with the systems managed and operated by others and affect the natural environments within the catchment.

A wide range of issues and concerns have been raised and discussed throughout the development of the DWMP for the Isle of Wight. These include:

• The majority of the Island is a combined sewer system with lots of sub-catchments connected to the Sandown WTWs which serves 120,000 of the 140,000 population. Consequently, there is a huge reliance on it. There are process benefits, but there are significant pressures on the system, for example, pumping over large distances, costs, energy consumption, gases, bursts, odours and spills. The longer term implications of these pressures and the wider impacts on the critical infrastructure on the Island must be considered.
• Infiltration is a general issue across the IoW and is exacerbated by tidal influence. Investigations are needed to identify exactly where infiltration and/or tidal ingress is taking place.
• Some coastal pumping stations and works are protected by sea walls / defences and these, along with any esplanade access routes, need to be protected.
• The Island is subject to landslips and coastal erosion so the benefits of protecting these assets should be factored into the costs of any proposed schemes to help secure government funding for flood defence and coastal protection schemes where contributions are required from several partners.
• We need to ensure leaking sewers do not exacerbate landslips and coastal erosion.
• The balance of water and the whole life costs of water management need to be taken into account. The DWMP for the Isle of Wightpresents an opportunity to develop a high level strategy or plan for water, including recycling and re-capturing water.
• The Solent has a deteriorating water environment and many treatment works discharge into it, not just those on the Island. The cumulative impact of these on water quality, habitats and biodiversity is severe and must be addressed.
• There are many other environmentally sensitive areas on the Island where the impact of effluent on achieving GES needs to be investigated.

We are progressing these issues through the development of the DWMP as set out in our investment needs for the Isle of Wight. Further, we commit to working with others to co-develop and co-deliver schemes that meet multi-organisational objectives and which benefit the environment, our customers and communities.

We developed and ran a series of activities between 2020 and 2022 as we prepared our DWMP for the Isle of Wight. The dates and purpose of the various webinars, workshops, meetings on individual wastewater systems and interim consultation were as follows:

The regionally based webinars presented and discussed issues and information relevant across the whole or our operating region. The presentations used in the webinars are available on our Who we’re working with page.

The presentations we discussed at the Isle of Wight workshops are below:

Workshop 1: held in September 2020, participants discussed the findings of the risk based catchment screening and proposed additional planning objectives for the DWMP.

Workshop 2: held in April 2021, participants:

(a) discussed the results from the BRAVA risk assessments and the proposed investment strategy for the wastewater catchments within the River Basin

(b) identified the generic options that should be explored to address the identified risks, and

(c) discussed which wastewater catchments to progress through the Options Development and Appraisal stage of the DWMP.

Workshop 3: held in March 2022, we reviewed and discussed the draft investment programme for the River Basin Catchment. This included the types of investment, priorities and timing for investment needs and the wider opportunities arising from the proposed investment in terms of partnership projects and catchment wide solutions providing multiple benefits.

The findings from our public and interim consultation are available on Have your say pages.