Scottish Water Long-Term Strategy

The RSE supports Scottish Water’s draft long-term strategy in principle. It presents a positive vision for Scotland’s water sector whilst being cognisant of the mounting challenges posed by climate change, ageing infrastructure, and demographic redistribution.

Download the RSE Scottish Water Long-Term Strategy (529KB, PDF)

However, it would stress the urgency of these challenges and encourage Scottish Water to adopt an even more ambitious approach, characterised by bold action and flexibility. This will ensure Scottish Water can continue to provide excellent public services in the face of future uncertainty. It is also critical to ensure that any initiatives are integrated through systems thinking to maximise impact and avoid unintended consequences.

Although we agree with the primary challenges that have been identified by the Strategy, it does overlook some critical issues. One is the growing threat of environmental pollutants, such as pharmaceuticals and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, sometimes referred to as ‘forever chemicals’), stemming from inadequate wastewater treatment. By proactively identifying and responding to these challenges, Scotland could be instrumental in shaping new industry standards for wastewater treatment, bringing both economic and social benefit.

The document rightly names climate change as one of the key challenges facing Scotland’s water now and into the future. However, some of the associated risks (and indeed, mitigations) could be more explicitly stated, such as the threat posed by more extreme warming scenarios.

Although the Strategy’s outcomes themselves are fitting, they should be grounded in robust metrics, clearly evidenced benefits, and transparent reporting. The Strategy also lacks a visible methodology to describe how its outcomes will be achieved. It is recognised that the timescale covered by the Strategy – 25 years – could preclude the development of a more detailed action plan at this stage, given that the operational context will continue to evolve. However, the RSE would still welcome a suitably high-level indication of how the Strategy will be delivered.

Scottish Government has decisively stated its intentions to develop a thriving domestic hydrogen economy and unveiled its first hydrogen export plan in November 2024 which sees Scotland becoming ‘a key producer and exporter of renewable hydrogen energy by 2030.’ It would be worth clarifying whether the Strategy’s aim of demand reduction has taken the growth of the hydrogen economy into account.

Encouraging consumers to reduce their demand for water will involve the deployment of new technologies or approaches to supplement changes in behaviour. Some of these systems will be expensive and so require a corresponding level of investment or subsidy to incentivise consumers to adopt them.

Given it is a critical determinant of the overall viability of the Strategy, it was somewhat disconcerting to discover that funding does not appear until step four of the document’s identified steps for delivery. Further, this figure appears not to capture the additional costs of implementing a more sophisticated monitoring regime to keep pace with a growing range of potential contaminants, nor the costs of seeding widespread consumer behaviour change (e.g. through incentive programmes). If properly harnessed, the pressure to secure additional funding could serve as the catalyst to implement new forms of partnership working to drive efficiencies.

Download the report

Download the RSE Scottish Water Long-Term Strategy (529KB, PDF)