Up to £11 million in water company fines and penalties will be reinvested back into a new Water Restoration Fund (WRF), Environment Secretary Steve Barclay announced this week.

All water company environmental fines and penalties since April 2022 have been ringfenced to directly improve the water environment.

The Water Restoration Fund will offer grant funding on a competitive basis to support local groups, farmers and landowners and community-led schemes, bolstering their capacity and capabilities for on-the-ground projects to improve the water environment. This could include activities that improve biodiversity and community access to blue and green spaces in areas where water companies have been issued with fines or penalties.

This delivers on the government’s long-term plan, set out in its Plan for Water, to clean up our waters and make polluters pay for the damage they cause to the environment.

The launch of the Fund follows significant action taken in recent months to hold water companies to account, including a ban on bonuses for water company executives where firms have committed serious criminal breaches, subject to Ofwat consultation, and plans to quadruple the Environment Agency’s regulatory capacity, enabling them to carry out 4,000 water company inspections by the end of this financial year.

Funding for the Water Restoration Fund comes exclusively from water company fines and penalties. These penalties and fines are additional to any reparations that water companies make when they have breached environmental regulations.

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