Stannon Lake Drought Permit

South West Water has been granted a drought permit under Section 79A of the Water Resources Act (WRA) 1991 to make temporary amendments to abstraction licence SW/049/0281/001/R01 to abstract water from Stannon Lake.

Paper copies of the drought permit documents are available for public inspection at the following locations:

• South West Water Head Office, Peninsula House, Rydon Lane, Exeter, EX2 7HR (9am – 5pm Mon-Fri).
• Sir John Moore House, Omaha Road, Bodmin, Cornwall, PL31 1EB (9am – 5pm Mon-Fri).
• Bude Post Office, Belle Vue, Bude, EX23 8LU (9am-5pm Mon-Fri, 9am-12.30pm Sat).

This permit is required due to exceptionally below average rainfall between April and September 2022 and is necessary to improve storage at our strategic Colliford Reservoir in preparation for 2023.

South West Water is committed to serving our customers, listening and responding to their needs, innovating to ensure water for all, and protecting our environment from challenges today and for future generations.

The exceptionally dry year we are experiencing, including the current drought, means that we must place even greater importance on our precious water supplies which support the lives of people and places they love. Our Drought Plan which has been approved by Defra, sets out the actions and interventions we will use to reduce the demand for water and options to increase access to water during such times.

South West Water has followed our robust plan focusing on what will provide the most benefit whilst we continue to look after our watercourses, waterbodies, and ecology and how we can all play or part in ensuring our water supplies are cared for. Our approach has meant that until 2022 we have avoided the need to impose demand restrictions for 25 years. South West Water continues to improve our operational resilience in a sustainable way and has considered further options but the exceptional shortage of rainfall and demand has meant we have had to take steps to protect supplies. We have taken these actions in line with our Drought Plan and with much consideration and understanding of the impact they will have.

As you would expect, South West Water monitors the level of rainfall, water storage and demand every day through established management structures. Though we promote water efficiency all year round, this year our customer communications were enhanced ahead of our Drought Plan actions, from May, as we observed the dry start to the year and demand increasing. Having tested our messages with customers, we used various engagement channels to communicate with our customers and this included us offering free water saving products and free leak detection and repairs for our customers’ private water leaks.

We have also minimised our own water use and through our supply network we have maximised the capacity in our water treatment works. Our key objective has been to maintain a stable supply and demand balance, optimising available resources, and minimising the impact of outages on network storage and customer supplies.

South West Water entered this year having achieved its best ever reported, in year, leakage performance. As we observed the dry weather lengthening, we advanced actions noted in our Drought Plan and significantly increased our leakage resources so that we could find and fix leaks faster, ensuring we were playing our part in protecting our water supplies.

We continue to monitor the situation in this and all our resource zones very closely and will take all necessary actions needed to protect our customers’ water supplies and the environment.

The application documents can be seen below.