On Thursday 7 November 2024, five members of the ‘Water Matters’ community spent five hours shut in the boardroom on the fourth floor of Southern Water’s HQ, under the watchful gaze of two Southern Water staffers and the watchful ears of the boardroom videoconference microphones. We were there to review the twelve ‘Water Resources Management Plan’ documents which have been deliberately excluded from the online document library published to accompany the current public consultation.
The bottom line?
Twenty-five people-hours worth of review and three hours worth of A27 traffic later, here is the clear and simple message:
None of us could see any justification for the restricted status applied to the ‘Options Appraisal’ or the ‘Strategic Environment Assessment’ documentation and we all believed that if the Company genuinely wanted open and transparent public engagement, these details should have been made available in the public domain.
We will be asking DEFRA to work with the appropriate government departments and regulatory bodies to use their privileged access levels to give due attention to these restricted documents and the underlying spreadsheets from which the data presented in them is sourced, manipulated and cross referenced.
Looking through the smokescreen
There’s undoubtedly a reason why the documents have been withheld from review but it certainly has little to do with matters of national security or commercial sensitivity.
A draft Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) had been received by the group the day before the session, along with the strict instructions that we would “need to deposit mobile phones with the supervising staff members for the duration of the day” and that “Laptops or other electronic devices will not be permitted and notes should be taken by hand.”
Further advice was given that “staff members supervising tomorrow’s visit will not be answering any questions related to the content of the documents being viewed or the WRMP in general.”
(On arrival, having left our laptops at home as instructed, we were told that no such restriction had been intended.)
The front page of the NDA covered the Purpose of the session and the Specially Notified “Confidential Information”, described in the small print shown below:
Purpose:
“To review the complete unredacted hard copy of Southern Water’s revised draft Water Resources Management Plan 2024 (“rdWRMP24”) published on 11 September 2024 in its entirety but not to take any copies, images, or other representation of the whole or any parts thereof or to share the information contained therein in the public domain whether through public talks, websites, social media, or otherwise.”
Specially Notified “Confidential Information”:
“Some of the documents comprising the rdWRMP24 have not been put into the public domain for reasons of Southern Water’s required compliance with the Security and Emergency Measures (Water and Sewerage) Undertakers Direction 2022, and/or in accordance with exemptions to disclosure further to Regulation 12(5)(a) of the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) 2004 (national security considerations) or Regulation 12(5)(e) EIR 2004 (confidentiality of commercial/ industrial information) namely:
Annex 1: Water Resource Zone Integrity Assessment
Annex 12: Options Appraisal
Annex 13: Option Factfiles
Annex 17 SEA Appendices A to H
Annex 17 SEA Appendix I: Constrained Options Assessments
Annex 17 SEA Appendix J: Demand Management Options Assessments
Annex 17 SEA Appendix K: Preferred Options Assessments
Annex 17 SEA Appendix L: Post Mitigation Significant Effects
Annex 18 Appendix B – New Options Screening
Annex 19 WFD Environmental Report Appendices
Annex 19 WFD Assessment Appendix A and B Stage 1 and 2
Annex 19 WFD Assessment Appendix C and D Revisions“
For reference and to set a context for the various Annexes listed above, the 32 volumes that Southern Water WRMP team which have published for public review are referenced at this link.
So what did we learn about Southern Water’s approach to disclosure of information?
The NDA that we were mandated to sign gave an interesting insight into the WRMP project team’s attitude to disclosure of information, its detailed terms and conditions unchanged from the boilerplate text downloaded in the freeware open-source template used.
The review team comprised a wide range of professional experience, not only of the water industry but also of commercial industry and public sector defence security protocols, so despite the limited time allowed we were prepared for the task.
As the day went on, Southern Water’s heavy-handed tactics in selectively restricting material from the public consultation increasingly resembled a clumsy attempt to hide information that could have challenged the Company’s chosen options. Notably, none of the documents we reviewed bore the markings typically associated with ‘confidential,’ ‘classified,’ or ‘restricted’ materials. To us, this underscores the absence of any clear justification for withholding their content from the ongoing public consultation.
So why had the Southern Water WRMP team not used an official, company-branded Non Disclosure Agreement?
Could it be that the company’s own legal team was hesitant to endorse its use, raising the question of whether this crosses the line from non-disclosure into concealment?
Havant Matters 