Regular readers will note that the Havant Matters website has been refreshed under a new banner highlighting the fact that ‘Water Matters‘. The driver for this is the publication of Southern Water’s current draft of its Water Resources Management Plan for a public consultation period ending on 4 December 2024.
For the record, we object to the proposal by Southern Water to prioritise effluent recycling schemes, including those at Havant, in Hampshire, Sandown on the Isle of Wight and Littlehampton in West Sussex.
The content on this website was originally created to help inform and support local residents during previous consultations on Southern Water’s Hampshire Water Transfer and Water Recycling Project – HWTWRP. The company’s HWTWRP proposal is made up of three interconnected components; the Havant effluent recycling plant, the 40+km pipeline that connects the recycling plant with Southern Water’s Otterbourne water treatment works and a highly contested proposal for a change of use for Portsmouth Water’s Havant Thicket Reservoir to enable its use as an environmental buffer lake.
The proposed Sandown and Littlehampton effluent recycling plant proposals will achieve environmental buffering by discharging the output from the recycling plant into rivers for dilution with fresh river water and re-abstraction further downstream.
Setting aside the approach to environmental balancing, many of the concerns and issues documented on this site with respect to the proposed Havant effluent recycling plant will apply equally to the Sandown and Littlehampton proposals. In addition, Sandown shares with Havant Southern Water’s questionable intention of constructing these plants on former landfill sites at coastal or flood plain locations.
Whether your drinking water is supplied by Southern Water or by Portsmouth Water, if Southern Water’s current proposals for effluent recycling are approved, then your tap water will include recycled effluent at some point within the next decade.
Consumers of both companies should review Southern Water’s WRMP, read the important notes on this website and, if they share our concerns, respond to Defra before 4 December 2024 to help promote the case for a more sustainable approach to water resource development that works with predicted climate change, not against it.
Havant Matters 