Cumbria and water go hand in hand, and United Utilities has been at the centre of that special relationship for more than 130 years.

While we owe a lot to the foresight of the Victorian engineers who first designed our water systems, we are continuing to build on their legacy to create a water and wastewater system that is strong enough to meet today’s challenges and expectations.
Climate change, extremes of dry weather or flooding, new development, tourism – all these things are putting more pressure on the systems we have been using for decades. We’ve made huge progress. Cumbria’s beaches and bathing waters are cleaner than ever, with 92 per cent meeting the top standards of good or excellent. 
Drinking water is at record levels of quality and our new pipeline from Thirlmere has brought reliable and secure supplies to West Cumbria. 
Working with partners like the RSPB, we are restoring wildlife habitats at a landscape scale.
We know there is more to do and, in particular, we hear the concerns about the health of our rivers and lakes. We’ve been steadily improving the processes at our wastewater treatment plants over the last 30 years, increasing their capacity and using the latest technology to clean our sewage before it goes back into the environment. 
But we need to tackle another pressing issue – one that is not new but that we are only just starting to fully understand – storm overflows.
There are enough sewers in the North West to go twice around the world, and more than half of these carry both sewage and rainwater in the same pipes. In dry weather, the system is around 15 per cent full, but during rainstorms it can fill up fast. 
Storm overflows, more than 2,000 of them, were designed into this system by the Victorians so that the water had somewhere to go when the pipes got full – into a river rather than flooding homes and streets.  
In the last few years we have begun monitoring these overflows to understand when they operate and we now see that this is happening far too often.  We have a plan to fix it.
We have just embarked on the biggest overhaul of our sewer system in history, but it will take time. We need to re-plumb our sewers to remove some of the rainwater. We need to build lots more storage underground so that sewers can hold back more volume. And we need to work with nature to slow down the flow of water from our built-up spaces, using soakaways, reed beds and wetlands.
Many of us are proud Cumbrians, from the civil engineers designing and building new infrastructure to the river rangers who are out and about cleaning up waterways and engaging with the public – we are all passionate about making a difference in our communities.  
We’re committed to playing our part and we are working closely with others on the wider issues that affect river water quality so that we can all be proud of our waterways here in Cumbria.