How the Catchment Based Approach Helps Us Get There
By Helena Soteriou-Hains, Head of River Catchment Strategy, Thames Water
At Thames Water, our catchment strategy team plays a unique role: we act as the bridge between our organisation and a wide range of external environmental groups. That includes local authorities, NGOs, and community-based initiatives, all working in different ways to improve the environment.
Our aim:
Build meaningful partnerships that meet our business goals and align with the priorities of others.
Our ethos:
We work holistically, building relationships and spotting crossovers between what we need and what our partners are trying to achieve.
Of course, with over 16 million customers in the Thames Water region and hundreds of stakeholders, from NGOs to local authorities, it’s a complex challenge to manage. That’s why we’ve adopted a catchment-based approach.
The idea is to break down our vast operational area into smaller, more manageable zones. There are 27 defined river catchments within our region, and we use these as the basis for local partnership work. It’s a practical way to bring focus to our efforts, building partnerships that are locally relevant while staying aligned to our wider environmental commitments.
The Smarter Water Catchments pilot:
One of our most significant recent initiatives has been the Smarter Water Catchments pilot, which we’ve been running across three catchments over the past five years. This has been a testbed for trying new approaches – particularly around partnership working.
I’m really looking forward to sharing the outcomes of this work at Waterscan’s Water Matters event next month.
The pilot has delivered some fantastic insights and importantly some tangible results. We’ve seen how collaboration can help funding go further, how joint projects can unlock multiple benefits, and how river health improvements often bring with them wider gains, such as increased biodiversity and lower carbon emissions.
Most importantly, we’ve proven that the catchment approach works. That’s why we’re now scaling it up across our entire region for the next five-year planning period.
There’s never been more public interest in the state of our rivers. And rightly so. We’re responding to that with real intent, putting partnerships, science, and place-based thinking at the heart of how we work. I’m excited to talk more about this journey at Water Matters and to learn from others who are equally passionate about driving environmental progress.
Join Helena on the 19th of June at Water Matters 2025, where she will be taking a deep dive into the catchment based approach in her Market Matters session, “£20m River Health Fund: Celebrating cleaner catchments.”
