United Utilities has launched a preliminary market engagement inviting organisations to submit proposals that could shape its second Drainage and Wastewater Management Plan (DWMP28), with a deadline of 12 June 2026.
The plan will set out how the company intends to maintain a resilient and sustainable drainage and wastewater system across the North West for a minimum 25-year horizon to 2055. A draft DWMP will be published for public consultation in November 2027, with the final plan due in August 2028, as required by Defra's guidance published in May 2025.
Building on DWMP23
United Utilities published its first DWMP in 2023, and the document proved consequential: it directly underpinned the company's PR24 business plan submission, helping secure what the company describes as the largest investment in wastewater infrastructure in more than a century. That includes a £2.4 billion combined sewer overflow programme targeting at least a 60% reduction in spills relative to 2020, and wider investment in river quality, nutrient removal and flood resilience.
United Utilities is seeking market proposals with a particular interest in catchment-scale approaches and solutions that deliver multiple benefits
DWMP28 is intended to go further. Writing in a strategic context document recently published, Asset Management Director Jo Harrison frames the new plan as an opportunity to be "even bolder", with the ambition of eliminating environmental harm from storm overflows by 2035 and halving internal sewer flooding incidence by 2050. The plan will cover investment requirements between 2030 and 2055, and is designed to set the company up for its PR29 regulatory submission.
A statutory plan in a transformed regulatory context
Unlike its predecessor, DWMP28 is a statutory requirement. The Environment Act 2021, section 79, introduced a legal duty on sewerage undertakers to prepare, publish and maintain a DWMP, which came into force in England on 1 September 2024. United Utilities is developing its plan against an unusually turbulent regulatory backdrop, with the Independent Water Commission's 88 recommendations now feeding into the government's A New Vision for Water White Paper, and significant changes underway on bathing water designations, biosolids, nutrient advice areas and environmental performance reporting.
Solution types may range from SuDS and natural flood management to demand reduction, sewerage network optimisation and catchment-based water quality interventions
The North West presents some specific planning challenges too. The region has 54% combined sewers compared to a 33% industry average, receives 40% more urban rainfall than the national norm, and contains 47% of England's most deprived neighbourhoods — all factors that shape the scale and nature of investment required.
What United Utilities is looking for
Having developed an initial options portfolio internally, United Utilities is now seeking complementary or alternative proposals from the market. The engagement is open to a wide range of organisations — landowners, design firms, delivery partners and operators — and is explicitly flagged as suitable for SMEs and community enterprises.
The company is particularly interested in catchment-scale approaches and proposals that deliver multiple benefits. Solution types can span sustainable drainage systems and natural flood management, customer-side demand reduction, sewerage network optimisation, and catchment-based water quality interventions including nutrient management. The strategic context document highlights the company's Integrated Water Management (IWM) approach — already being delivered in partnership with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Environment Agency, and expanding across all five North West counties — as the philosophy underpinning how third-party options will be considered.
