Nature-Based Water Solutions: Insights from United Utilities' Asset Management Director Jo Harrison

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from around the world. My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Joe Harrison from United Utilities here in the UK. And we're gonna be talking about nature-based solutions. Joe, brilliant to have you with me. Thank you for taking the time. Now, let's go back to the start of your career. How did you get into water?
[00:00:26] Jo Harrison: My journey in water probably starts quite early. My father worked for Severn Trent Water. It was a bit of a family business and I did all my work experience and university holiday jobs at Severn Trent. I studied environmental science at university. For the first couple of years of my career I worked in environmental consultancy mainly on renewable energy. I then did a master's degree in pollution control in Manchester. After a few more years of environmental consultancy, I joined United Utilities. So, I've been at UU for 26 years. I joined on their graduate scheme. I've had operational roles, strategic roles, but for the last 10 years I've led our long-term planning through a variety of different roles. But leading on our approach to asset management.
[00:01:13] Piers Clark: Now, I didn't know that, but I also studied environmental sciences and I also started my career on the graduate training scheme at United Utilities. But I don't think we overlapped. Where we don't connect is my parents. We’re not in the water sector. How does your father view what you do now?
[00:01:28] Jo Harrison: We have a lot of competitive banter about which is the best water company in the UK. My brother-in-law works at Severn Trent as well, so there's definitely a Midlands contingent that I have to encounter and deal with a little bit. But he loves it!
[00:01:42] Piers Clark: For those people who aren't aware, Severn Trent is one of the big water utilities in the UK and it's based in the Midlands as Joe just mentioned. United Utilities is a bit further north. So, let's talk about United Utilities. Tell me, where exactly are you positioned in the UK and how many people do you serve? What sort of activities do you do?
[00:01:58] Jo Harrison: United Utilities covers the northwest of England, so it covers the region from Shropshire in the south up to the Scottish border, including the major cities of Manchester and Liverpool and the Lake District. So we have a very diverse region, or about 7 million customers that live across our region. We've got some of the most rural areas and some of the most urban areas in the UK.
[00:02:22] Piers Clark: Lots of people might have heard of the Lake District as that's a sort of internationally famous area, and the Lake District sits slap bang in the United Utilities territory, doesn't it?
[00:02:31] Jo Harrison: Absolutely. So, we get most of our water from the Lake district. Back in Victorian times engineers built two very significant reservoirs in the Lake District called Thirlmere and Hawes Water, and they supply greater Manchester and the water for Liverpool comes from Wales as well. We also bring in water from other parts of the UK outside of our region to supply some of our cities.
[00:02:54] Piers Clark: We now come to the main topic of today, which is nature-based solutions, which I know is very close to your heart. But let's start by clarifying exactly what we mean by nature-based solutions.
[00:03:05] Jo Harrison: Lots of different people talk about nature-based solutions and they're talking about different things. Nature-based solutions is essentially using the natural environment to either retain flows or treat flows to drive improvements. They include things like sustainable drainage systems, which are used to prevent flooding and manage surface water, or they can be things like engineered read beds to reduce the phosphorus levels associated with wastewater discharges. They can be very natural solutions in our landscape; the function of landscape architecture, if you like. Swales and SuDS and different ways of managing our urban environment to hold and treat water. Or they can be more engineered systems. So, they can be reed beds growing in concrete tanks, or sort of natural systems that you recreate downstream of your wastewater treatment works to really look at how you can polish and remove nutrients, but also proving very effective at looking at metal levels and containing microplastics, and various other things. We also use nature-based solutions to protect drinking water quality, particularly around upland reservoirs where you can restore the natural environment to deliver much improved color and quality of water, but also where we don't own catchment lands. Working very closely with farmers to protect bore holes as an example. Those measures can also be employed by agriculture more broadly to protect watercourses. Planting trees and creating ecosystems around watercourses really helps to improve water quality.
[00:04:38] Piers Clark: I want to drill into some specific examples, if we may, but just before we get to that, when did United Utilities journey start with nature-based solutions?
[00:04:49] Jo Harrison: It started over 20 years ago when we embarked on a program called SCaMP, which stood for Sustainable Catchment Management, and this was around protecting our upland water sources. We have a lot of reservoirs in the Lake District, Lancashire, and the Pennine Hills around greater Manchester. And one of the issues that we were finding was that the legacy of the industrial revolution had caused lots of erosion of peat, which naturally occurs on the uplands. And that was causing us to have problems with taste and odor in the reservoirs, but also color, which would be very expensive to treat for technological solutions. So, we embarked upon restoring the natural ecosystem and restoring the peat around our reservoirs and catchments. And that proved very effective at reducing the need for high tech investment at our treatment works downstream. And of course it costs an awful lot less money. And it also delivers lots of other benefits. So, we had huge benefits for biodiversity and some of the protected species that we saw on our land. And I think now we look at those solutions as being the norm. But also, you see the wider benefits that we get particularly around carbon sequestration, but also around the resilience of our catchments. We're seeing more frequent, significant storms, which can be quite damaging in the natural environment if you haven't got resilient ecosystems. We're seeing a huge benefit from delivering those systems today.
[00:06:13] Piers Clark: When you started on this journey how did your stakeholders, such as the regulators and the public respond to this?
[00:06:18] Jo Harrison: One of the things that we have to do was convince the regulators that investing in a natural environment and improving ecosystems was as valid as investing in treatment technologies. And there are ways in which the British regulation around water companies could sometimes prevent that from happening. So, we have to really see nature as an asset class. We had lots of very constructive discussions back in the early 2000s and they did allow that to proceed. That's been the root and foundation of a lot of our investment and protection of our habitats over the last 20 years. More recently, when we look at how we can find nature-based solutions to wastewater issues, we're having quite a lot of interesting discussions with our regulators around that. The Environment Agency, in particular, has concerns about nature-based solutions preventing us from implementing them for some scenarios. They are very supportive when it comes to managing water quantity. So, looking at delivering sustainable urban drainage in our cities and trying to manage water flows that's something that they really support. They're less supportive when it comes to looking at the quality targets that we have and improving the quality of discharges. There's a number of reasons for that, and of them is that they perceive that nature-based solutions take longer to become effective. That's not actually the experience that we've seen in the Northwest or other companies have seen. So, it's an area that we're trying to talk to the Environment Agency about and provide more evidence. Similarly, they are also worried about the overlap between water companies' responsibilities and the responsibilities of agriculture. To deliver nature-based solutions, sometimes the options are to actually manage land in a better way. That's where we're having lots of debates at the moment. But it feels like a little bit of a missed opportunity if we can't utilize nature-based solutions, particularly with some of the regulatory challenges that we have in the UK where we've got to achieve significant improvements in the spills from our sewer overflows. And one of the ways of doing that is to remove surface water and manage it differently in the urban environment.
[00:08:27] Piers Clark: Can we now talk about some specific examples, ones that you are particularly proud of, what you've achieved and what the solution is that's been put in there and maybe some of the criteria, the KPIs against which you're measuring the success of that installation?
[00:08:40] Jo Harrison: One of the first wastewater projects that we did was on the River Petrol, and it's part of the Eden Catchments in the Penrith area of Cumbia. It's a very rural river; largely covered by dairy farming, so lots of cows in the catchment. From a water company perspective, there are small villages and hamlets served by very small wastewater treatment works. And their wastewater treatment works that operates under very sustainable parameters. So, they are biological systems and they don't require significant power and they don't use chemicals; very sustainable, very low carbon. At the beginning of our last investment period, about six years ago, the Environment Agency required us to deliver significant improvements to those treatment works, which would've required us to put in high voltage power and chemical treatment, which didn't feel right in those circumstances. And we also questioned the evidence that the Environment Agency was using around the impact that those treatment works was having on the natural environment. So, we stood back from it and we got agreement with the Environment Agency that we would take a more holistic look at the catchment. We started by doing an awful lot of research. We did lots of sampling, monitoring, and modeling of the catchment to understand the cause of nutrient pollution in the catchment. And what that revealed was that some of our assets, some of our waste water treatment did have an impact, but they weren't necessarily the ones that had been identified by the Environment Agency, but the far bigger impact was from agriculture. We set about developing what we called capture catchment nutrient balancing. How do we reduce the nutrient levels in the catchment to go beyond what the Environment Agency was asking for, but doing it in a really holistic way? We set about delivering some sustainable nature-based solutions at our treatment works that were identified as having an impact. But more critically, we started to work with farmers in the area. We worked alongside the Rivers Trust, who are a charity in the UK who protect rivers, and we started to look at how we could implement nature-based solutions across the catchment. We looked at essentially creating buffer strips along the tribute trees and along the river. Looking at how they could manage cattle differently. Looking at covering some of the silage and manure stores and looking at where cattle travel as they go from the farm yard through into the fields, and looking whether we could protect areas that were getting particularly damaged and compacted where there would be a lot of rainwater runoff. We did a whole host of work across catchment and one of the really interesting things was that we were obviously contributing to farmers to implement some of those solutions, but we weren't paying for all of the investment. We were just giving them enough money so that they could then source other ways of funding those interventions from government and from our environmental regulators.
[00:11:35] Piers Clark: And that approach was still cheaper and less carbon intensive than sticking in a traditional concrete solution.
[00:11:42] Jo Harrison: We saved about 6 million pounds, which went back into reinvesting in other assets to improve our overall performance. It delivered a significant improvement in phosphorus and went way beyond the targets set by the Environment Agency. But we also discovered that Nestle were working in the area. All the dairy farmers in that area sell their milk to Nestle to make powdered milk and Nestle was interested in creating a very high protein milk. They wanted to incentivize farmers to keep nutrients on the grass to create this best type of grassland to give the cows higher levels of nutrients. They were paying farmers a premium for higher quality milk. This meant we were both trying to achieve the same thing within the catchment. And so, we've started to create an ecosystem market where we're paying farmers to deliver better quality milk, protect the environment, and everybody is a winner.
[00:12:38] Piers Clark: See what I love about this story. I'm sure there are some traditional engineers who hate it because they liked black boxes, concrete boxes, that you understood what went in, you controlled the process, and you knew what came out. But this is how the water sector should be operating, with this catchment wide view of how is the whole watershed being managed. Who are the stakeholders in there? What is it that they're doing, and how do we all work together to deliver the best outcome? And it's a mind shift in how you do asset management. With that in mind, let me ask you the question. What do you wish you knew when you started this process that you now know? What have you learned that would be so important that other people listening to this need to hear it?
[00:13:16] Jo Harrison: One of the things that we've learned in the journey that we've gone on in the last six or seven years, is just essentially have the courage of your convictions. Regulation can be very perverse and counterintuitive in many ways and, particularly in the UK, we find that it can often work against doing the right thing. If you believe that there's better way of doing something and that regulation is stopping you from doing that, and you can deliver something that delivers multiple benefits in a better, cheaper, more efficient way, then it is trying to grasp the bull by the horns and continue to push it; not take no for an answer. That's how we've driven quite a lot of the progress we've made on delivering nature-based solutions across the northwest, by really not taking no for an answer.
[00:14:01] Piers Clark: Joe, we're running out of time. So, my last question to you is to think back to your parents. You've mentioned at the start your father was in the water sector. What's the best advice he's given you?
[00:14:10] Jo Harrison: I think just follow your heart. My father was a solicitor for Severn Trent, so we've got entirely different backgrounds. When I was choosing my A Levels, I chose biology, chemistry, and geography and there was great debate about whether they were the right A levels to take. Ultimately, you have to do something you are passionate about and that you love. And they were the subjects I loved and I used them every day in my job even though I took my A levels more than 30 years ago. I think that sort of confidence and support from your parents to say follow your heart.
[00:14:46] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Jo Harrison from United Utilities here in the UK and we've been talking about nature-based solutions. I hope you can join us next time. Thank you.