Water company Severn Trent has pledged to invest £4.4 billion to improve storm overflows – with Staffordshire identified as one of the three regions set to benefit the most.
The £4.4 billion sum will be invested over a 25-year period up to 2050 as part of Severn Trent’s plans to reduce spills from storm overflows.
The investment will be divided up into regions, with Staffordshire set to benefit from £643 million from the total.
Some of this total investment forms part of the bigger £12.9 billion investment programme from 2025 to ensure the security of water supply and will deliver significant improvements in the region’s water and sewerage system.
A total of 2,472 storm overflows will undergo investment – each with its own individual action plan – with a variety of improvements ranging from increasing the capacity of storage tanks to introducing green nature-based solutions.
Severn Trent is also investing to ensure rivers are monitored closer than ever before with 100 per cent of its storm overflows with monitors – and the company is now analysing around 300 million pieces of data a year helping to prioritise investment.
The improvements form part of the water company’s Storm Overflow Action Plan. The plan, which will be regularly updated as improvements are made, will reduce the number of spills into watercourses across the region, ensuring that by 2040 no overflow will spill more than 10 times in an average year in high priority areas, and in all areas by 2045, five years ahead of Government targets.
Bob Stear, Severn Trent’s Chief Engineer, said the announcement marks a significant milestone in the company’s drive to deliver “real improvements in river health.”
He said: “This is why we launched Get River Positive that has already delivered great results, despite the region having experienced seven named storms between September and December, contributing to some of the wettest months on record. And we know there is still more to do, which is why this investment is so important – not just to us, but to our region’s rivers and the communities they serve.”
More than 70 projects – worth around £384 million – designed to contribute to spills reduction will be completed in 2024/5 but no specific projects in Staffordshire have been announced yet.
A live ‘Event Duration Monitor’ map, which will show what investment plans are taking place in all storm overflows across the region, will be launched later this year.
