The team at Strategy Engineering Research Group extends its sincere thanks to all speakers, sponsors, and attending delegates for making the Smart Wastewater Systems Conference a valuable platform for learning, collaboration, and benchmarking. The event created a space for open dialogue across operational, technical, and strategic communities, helping define the direction of wastewater innovation and compliance performance.
Across two intensive days, the conference brought together a rich cross-section of expertise from Anglian Water, Yorkshire Water and the Yorkshire Water Storm Alliance, Southern Water, Continuum Industries, Detectronic, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Aquafin (Belgium), Watercare (Auckland, New Zealand), IRIS (Van Denmark), WIR (UK), and Northumbrian Water, amongst others.
The Industry Inflection: Execution Becomes the Benchmark
A consistent theme across the UK, European, and Australasian presentations was the recognition that the current asset-management period — AMP8— marks a true deployment era for the UK water industry. As Alex Rosenbaum, Portfolio Strategy Manager at Anglian Water, observed, AMP8 represents the inflection point between proof of concept and full implementation. The transition from pilot projects to portfolio-wide delivery now demands consistency, open data exchange, and shared digital architecture, ensuring future-readiness for AMP9.
While technology remains a powerful enabler of progress, the conference made clear that deployment strategy — rather than technology itself — ultimately determines success. What set this inaugural event apart was its focus on practical deliverability rather than product demonstration. Discussion centred on how to deploy hundreds of sensors in ways that meaningfully change decisions, hard-wiring critical sites and converting data into actionable control. Delegates examined how to fuse multi-source data into operational workflows, ensuring interventions lead directly to measurable spill and pollution reduction.
The collective message from presentations and panels was clear: since privatisation, many utilities have seen marked improvements in spill metrics and pollution performance, yet regulatory targets continue to accelerate faster than the industry’s capacity to deliver. This growing tension between ambition and capability is shaping strategic discussions across utilities. Encouragingly, most contributions highlighted tangible progress, showing that real achievements are being made even amid challenging expectations.
Should Section 82 Be Slowed Down?
Dave Walker, Global Future Trends Director at Detectronic, underlined that certain early clauses associated with Section 82 continuous water-quality monitoring were drafted and enacted before viable instruments fully existed. Ammonia-sensor capability, for instance, lagged behind legislative intent. This raised an important debate on whether the industry should accelerate Section 81 initiatives first — covering event monitoring, pump optimisation, and asset-control interventions — before pushing too aggressively into Section 82, where technology standards remain unsettled. This question will continue to evolve as regulators and utilities assess readiness — watch this space for updates.
Hybrid Modelling and Catchment Thinking
Hybrid modelling was another prominent theme. The presentation from Yorkshire Water and the Yorkshire Storm Alliance demonstrated how combining statistical and deterministic methods can halve the time required to deliver credible storm-overflow solutions. In data-scarce catchments, hybrid models provide interim evidence for permitting and add measurable value. Traditional hydric models cannot deliver overflow assessments quickly enough for modern expectations, but machine-learning-enhanced hybrid frameworks now offer a scalable route to industrialise storm-overflow modelling for AMP8 and beyond. As John Stokes of Yorkshire Water aptly stated: “We can’t solve twenty-first-century problems with twentieth-century spreadsheets.”
Steve Blanks of Northumbrian Water also emphasised the importance of linking catchments — a concept still at an early stage but rapidly gaining traction across utilities. All participants stressed that adopting a whole-catchment approach will be central to reducing spills and strengthening resilience. The connection between hybrid modelling and catchment-scale decision-making emerged as a defining insight of the two-day programme.
Informal Dialogue and Forward Momentum
Many of the most constructive exchanges took place outside formal sessions — during coffee breaks, lunch discussions, and impromptu side meetings. Speakers and delegates used these moments to map next steps, share pilot experiences, and challenge assumptions about scale-up and governance.These informal interactions helped set a shared ambition: to build on the strengths of the inaugural conference and shape an even more delivery-focused 2026 edition.
Dates for the Diary – 1 & 2 December 2026 and a Half-Yearly Online Update in March 2026
Following these exchanges, Strategy Engineering Research Group confirms that the next Smart Wastewater Systems Conference will take place on 1–2 December 2026, deliberately positioned within a less congested calendar window. This scheduling will allow broader participation and alignment with regulatory and AMP8/AMP9 reporting cycles. The main 2026 event, together with a half-year virtual update in March, will expand on proven delivery themes while maintaining a balanced structure between strategic dialogue and practical field insight.
Over the next six months, the team will continue close research engagement with utilities and partners to refine these ideas and ensure that 2026 sessions address the most pressing implementation bottlenecks. For now, the Chair’s Remarks for this year’s event remain available online, offering a concise overview of what was achieved. Those seeking greater depth are encouraged to watch the recorded sessions or request the full post-conference report, which captures the nuance, data, and forward-looking recommendations from across the two-day programme.
Chair's Initial Thoughts
Within the Chair’s Initial Thoughts section of this website, readers will find summary write-ups of each presentation and many of the key panel discussions.
For those unable to join in person or online, full video and audio recordings are available for download, accompanied by a comprehensive post-conference report offering forward-looking analysis and collective recommendations from the speakers and Q&A sessions.
A fully comprehensive post-conference package featuring all audio, video, available presentations and report is also availble for purchase.