In his regular column, Oliver Grievson, Associate Director AtkinsRéalis and Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter, considers how good governance of data could be a way to inspire public confidence.
One of the water industry’s challenges that isn’t getting the mainstream media’s attention is the prospect of a monitoring programme at a scale that has never been seen before. The installation of monitoring in the wastewater system is set to reach over 50,000 measurement points by 2035 for regulatory monitoring alone.
The industry will need to ensure that all of the data that is collected and shared with the public is as accurate as possible, or risk public confidence in water company data eroding further.
The answer to this challenge is of course in the good governance of the data, which can play a key role in rebuilding public confidence.
So, what is governance? Most people will be aware of the international standards around governance – ISO9001 covers business management systems, ISO14001 environmental management, ISO55001 asset management systems and ISO17025 covering good laboratory practice. These form the fundamentals of setting up management systems to ensure processes are followed with a measurable quality management system.
The cycle of setting up policies, processes and procedures, and then the cycle of auditing to make sure the processes are appropriate and being followed, underpins most industries.
Back in 2005 the data surrounding the amount of flow being treated in wastewater treatment works was highlighted as being poor in quality. The Environment Agency and water companies worked together, and MCERTS (or Monitoring Certification Scheme), a scheme run by the Environment Agency, was born. It ensures that the data being collected has been quality assured and that there is a management system in place to guarantee the data is reliable.
It’s a scheme that has been used to collect wastewater flow data for almost twenty years, but historically has only been applied to a small fraction of the industry. This is set to change and is soon to be applied to more of the monitoring that the industry is installing within wastewater treatment works.
Over the years there has been criticism that the scheme is burdensome and costly, however the scheme does provide the assurance that the data being collected can be all but guaranteed to be correct within a well-run management system.
The underlying truth of this is that the quality management system and the associated governance is there to ensure that everything that the industry does is in line with good practice and is continuously being improved. This is already in place for the water industry. Companies just have to be authorised to follow it to justify the investment required.
Although this was done for elements of wastewater flow back in 2005 and has been approved again for a number of future monitoring aspects, it is yet to be applied to elements such as CSO monitoring.
Reliable data helps not just the customer, enabling them to have confidence in the data that they see on the various portals that are now readily available for public viewing, but it also helps the water companies too. Why? Data that has governance associated with it, data that has a check system in place, with expert review and auditing, gives confidence in the investment that the industry is set to deliver.
Ensuring that good governance is in place is the cornerstone of every single industry and having those governance systems behind the data the industry collects will ensure that everyone can have the confidence and security that the monitoring is enabling the environment to be managed as it deserves to be.
