URGENT – Action Needed by Sunday 23 August
Southern Water’s plan to turn Havant Thicket Reservoir – built and consented as a natural chalk-spring reservoir – into a store for recycled treated sewage effluent is now before the Planning Inspectorate. This affects you whether you’re a Southern Water or Portsmouth Water customer.
Why it matters
Portsmouth Water customers: you will be drinking the water, the draft Order could let Southern Water (or a third-party contractor) take control of your reservoir and restrict how Portsmouth Water can use it to supply you, with no consultation and no say in operation.
Southern Water customers: you would ultimately be drinking water that has passed through a recycling plant sited on a contaminated landfill next to Langstone Harbour. Pilot data show that contaminants of concern – PFAS “forever chemicals,” pharmaceuticals, trace organics and treatment by-products – can pass through the treatment process in small quantities. Many have no Environmental Quality Standard, so the Environment Agency has confirmed it cannot set permit limits for them, and there’s currently no dedicated UK regulatory regime for this technology that would ensure the robust independent audit and control that is required in other countries using effluent recycling.
Everyone’s bills: the plant’s energy demand (reverse osmosis treatment plus uphill pumping) is large and would be funded through water bills for roughly the next 60 years, while relying on future grid decarbonisation rather than a lower-energy solution now.
What water company customers can do
Given the complexity of the issues and the very short time available to act, the simplest and most effective step if you object to the plans, is to add your voice to the Water Matters campaign, rather than trying to draft your own submission from scratch. Water Matters is the community research and campaign team who have spent several years pursuing this project through what has been a very poor public consultation process, with most customers not aware of this planned fundamental change to the source of their drinking water.
- Read the Water Matters page: -wm-response
- If you support their position, complete the short online form linked from that page – this registers your support without requiring you to write a technical submission yourself.
- Prefer to write your own submission? You can still make a written representation to the Planning Inspectorate directly, referencing whichever issues matter most to you (alternatives assessment, water quality, construction on a landfill, lack of control, etc.) and asking the Examining Authority to treat them as Principal Issues.
- Share this with neighbours and local groups. Given the deadline, numbers matter more than individual detail – wider, visible support strengthens the case for proper scrutiny.