Our new Draft Drought Plans 2027

Welcome to our consultation - we would like your feedback to help inform and develop our plans.

We are required to update our Drought Plans every five years, the first stage of this is to produce Draft Drought Plans. We submitted our Essex & Suffolk Water and Northumbrian Water draft Drought Plans 2027 to Defra on 31 March 2026 and received approval to publish to undertake a public consultation on 29 April 2026.

Our draft Drought Plans 2027 consultation is open for 12 weeks from 21 May 2026 to 13 August 2026. We will then consider all the comments we receive and publish a Statement of Response, which will detail the changes we have made to our plan as a result of the feedback, along with our revised draft Drought Plan.

Subject to approval of our revised draft Drought Plans from the Secretary of State, our final Drought Plans will then be adopted and published.

You may like to comment on:

The way we plan to deal with a drought;

The way we plan to monitor the environment before, during and after a drought; and

The way we plan to communicate with or customers during a drought.

We invite you to:

Email your comments and feedback on our draft Drought Plans to water.resources@defra.gov.uk.
In your email subject header please specify which Drought Plan consultation you are responding to by including the words “Essex & Suffolk Water draft Drought Plan Consultation” or “Northumbrian Water draft Drought Plan Consultation”.
Please copy waterresources@nwl.co.uk into your email to Defra.
If necessary, any representations by post should be sent to: Drought Plan Consultation, Defra, Drought, Seacole, 2 Marsham Street, London SW1P 4DF.

Hard copies of both our ESW and NW draft Drought Plans can be made available at either of our offices below. Please let us know in advance if you would like a hard copy by emailing waterresources@nwg.co.uk and we will have it ready for your collection.

Essex & Suffolk Water, Sandon Valley House, Canon Barnes Road, East Hanningfield, Essex, CM3 8BD.

Northumbrian Water: Northumbria House, Abbey Road, Pity Me, Durham, DH1 5FJ.

Exclusions on the Grounds of National Security

 Under Section 37B(10)(b) of the Water Industry Act 1991, as amended by the Water Act 2003 ("the Act"), the Secretary of State can direct companies to exclude any information from published drought plans on the grounds that it appears to him that the publication would be contrary to the interests of national security. No information has been excluded from this plan.