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Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange 15 minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and today my guest is the Chief Executive of Southern Water, Lawrence Gosden.
[00:00:16] Piers Clark: Lawrence, wonderful to have you with us today.
[00:00:18] Lawrence Gosden: Hi Piers.
[00:00:19] Piers Clark: Now, regular listeners will be wondering what that background noise is that trickling water? And that is because this is our first out in the field podcast and I'm standing by the River Anton, which feeds into the River Test, by a beautiful chalk stream that has been reinvigorated by some activity that Southern Water's undertaken.
And we are gonna be talking about exactly what it is Southern Water has done and why they did it.
[00:00:44] Piers Clark: But Lawrence, before we get into that, our audience will love to know a little bit about our speaker. So tell me, what did you do before you became Chief Executive of Southern Water?
[00:00:54] Lawrence Gosden: Well, I've been in the water sector my entire career, and I love it!
[00:00:57] Lawrence Gosden: It's genuinely the most incredible, diverse and complex sector, and once you're in it, it became very addictive. My first job was actually laying pipes, water and sewage rising mains, for about four years prior to going to university. Didn't have a clue what I wanted to do and thought I'd just go and get this job with a little Irish contracting firm out of Brighton.
[00:01:17] Lawrence Gosden: Absolutely loved it. I'm still in contact with the guy who started that company in the 1970s now.
[00:01:23] Piers Clark: Excellent. So you then went to university. What'd you study at university?
[00:01:26] Lawrence Gosden: I did civil engineering at university. It's interesting looking back at your career and spotting these moments when somebody has inspired you. Because the only reason I did civil engineering was 'cause I quite liked doing this pipe laying. Every day I got brilliant wage in my pocket and a little brown envelope every Thursday. And then I could go out with all my friends, which was very important at that point.
[00:01:43] Lawrence Gosden: But I met the site engineer and I was always curious. I was always wanting to know what the next thing was and I always wanted to drive the digger and then drive the dumpers. And then I got chatting to the site engineer, how do you do that?
[00:01:53] Lawrence Gosden: And that engineer told me to go and do civil engineering at university and he inspired me to be able to do that. Now the funny thing is I re-met up with him about a year ago, just bumped into him and just said to him, do you realize that conversation we had,
[00:02:05] Piers Clark: It's all your fault.
[00:02:06] Lawrence Gosden: 36 years ago, inspired me.
[00:02:08] Lawrence Gosden: So yes, I went off to Brighton University to do civil engineering and then came out of that back into the water sector and was involved as a project manager delivering all the big urban wastewater projects that were running in the early nineties when sewage really did go into the sea, built all these treatment plants everywhere, took us to a point where about 95% is all fully treated before it's released now.
[00:02:30] Piers Clark: I've known you for 20 years or so, and you've got this really interesting background of having been both head of operations, which requires a certain mindset to be in operations. There's a burst pipe, it's three in the morning. I need that sorted. Yet also been head of asset management where that's a much more long-term strategic view.
[00:02:47] Piers Clark: Do you see yourself as having both of those personalities?
[00:02:50] Lawrence Gosden: I sort of see myself as I need to understand purpose. So operation without purpose is just running day in day. It was quite soulless.
[00:02:58] Lawrence Gosden: So asset management is I need to be able to understand where we are taking a series of operating assets in the short term, medium term and through into the long term. And I think if you can always make sure that you've been able to connect in the action as part of a longer term strategy, then you are delivering with purpose.
[00:03:16] Lawrence Gosden: So whether you're running an operation, whether you are building capital projects, it sort of makes sense when you link it into long-term strategy.
[00:03:22] Piers Clark: Excellent.
[00:03:23] Piers Clark: Now, Lawrence, for listeners who don't know anything about Southern Water, tell me where you are, who you serve, what sort of activities you do.
[00:03:29] Lawrence Gosden: So Southern Water is a water and sewage company on the south coast of the UK. We cover the main counties of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight.
[00:03:39] Lawrence Gosden: We deliver wastewater services across that entire area but on the water side of the organization, we only actually supply about half of the region . The rest of it's supplied by some neighbouring water companies.
[00:03:49] Piers Clark: And just to link this back to your introduction, you said you went to University of Brighton, and Brighton is one of the key cities that Southern Water covers.
[00:03:57] Lawrence Gosden: Absolutely. It is. So yeah, Brighton, Hastings, Southampton, Portsmouth, all the way through to Canterbury and all the great cities of Kent.
[00:04:04] Piers Clark: Excellent. Right. We're gonna move away from this stream, but you've got a sense of just how beautiful this stream is just from the noise, I hope.
[00:04:14] Piers Clark: Okay, we've now moved to a much quieter area. It's springtime and the willows are just beginning to come into bloom, and it's like a mirror in front of me. I can see the sky reflected in the clear crystal waters.
[00:04:27] Piers Clark: Now, Lawrence, you were just telling me about why this particular bit of water is so important. Why is that?
[00:04:33] Lawrence Gosden: It really is mesmerizing, isn't it? I mean, the clarity of chalk rivers is just extraordinary. So the bit that we're looking at now is like a backwater off of the main channel. And the main channel is obviously running at a faster flow. So you get that nice scour that you want so that the fish can lay their eggs in those kind of areas. But you also need areas where the fish can chill out a little bit and relax.
[00:04:55] Piers Clark: A fish hotel, I think you call it.
[00:04:57] Lawrence Gosden: Fish hotel. Exactly.
[00:04:58] Lawrence Gosden: So that's what this backwater section is doing really. It's somewhere where they can take shelter, they can hide away from predators, and it gives them somewhere to chill out the rest of it.
[00:05:08] Piers Clark: Awesome. Okay, we're now standing back by the river and I'm looking through the waters and I can see the white chalky bottom of this stream. Lawrence, tell me about these chalk streams.
[00:05:20] Lawrence Gosden: These are sort of a rainforest level, important habitats. The UK has the world's greatest concentration of chalk rivers. They're extraordinary because they are not surface water led. They are mostly, or almost entirely fed through aquifers, which means that the water that is coming into the chalk stream has been trickling through aquifers for a very, very long time.
[00:05:45] Lawrence Gosden: So hence, you get this crystal clear. I mean, genuinely clear quality water, that's also very cold. And the temperature of that water is very important 'cause the temperature is also how you can safeguard these kinds of rivers against climate change.
[00:06:00] Piers Clark: Lawrence, we've found a quiet place beside the river to delve into the key topic today, which is what you have been doing here and I can hear some birds in the background, which are possibly coming through on the recording, but let's get into what is it you're doing here and why?
[00:06:15] Lawrence Gosden: Okay, so we're gonna do a little bit of history. Firstly, in order for chalk rivers, or in fact any river to be successful, it needs three things. It needs water quality, it needs water volume and it needs river morphology. So the river needs to be, to be honest with you, not mucked around by human beings. With those three things, rivers can look after themselves very, very well.
[00:06:37] Lawrence Gosden: So what's happened here when you go back in history is a case study in human beings interfering with nature. So after the Second World War, the government incentivized farmers in the "Dig for Britain" incentive to give them money to make more agricultural land available to generate more agricultural crops to feed the country and to get the country back in its feet. Totally understandable considering where the country was at that place, of course.
[00:07:04] Lawrence Gosden: But the consequence of that was on the river Anton and in many places actually in the UK, was instead of having a lovely chalk river that's meandering across the bottom of a flood plain and doing its thing, creating its fish hotels naturally with its oxbow lakes and doing all the stuff that we've all learned in geography lessons at school, they shifted the river to one side of the floodplain and made it a motorway. They made it deeper. They made it dead straight, and they turned it literally into a river motorway, and that drained the area.
[00:07:34] Piers Clark: And destroyed the chalk habitat that was there.
[00:07:37] Lawrence Gosden: Completely overnight, ruined it entirely. So that not only took the level of the groundwater down, so that helped 'em with getting cows and sheep and agriculture. But at the same time then it completely ruined those chalk rivers so they were no longer able to form gravel scours and habitats where fish can lay their eggs and can do what they need to do.
[00:08:00] Lawrence Gosden: So what we're doing here is going back and reversing all of that work. And we have an incredible contractor who have just learned over many, many decades how to re-wiggle rivers, basically. It's a lovely expression.
[00:08:17] Lawrence Gosden: And that re-wiggling is simply big diggers, digging up, creating a wiggle design where there was a previously a straight motorway, digging out the ponds and giving the river a start back. And we're gonna do about seven kilometers of about 14 kilometers in the River Anton. By some stretch, the biggest river restoration project in the UK.
[00:08:36] Lawrence Gosden: But when we first started, I have to say, when I came down to visit the project, it looked like a battlefield. It was horrific. And I remember standing there with the team saying, you know, oh my goodness, we were supposed to be making things better. What is happening?
[00:08:51] Lawrence Gosden: Now, it is quite incredible how fast nature recovered. Within one year, the place was unrecognizable, covered in plant life, the Ranunculus was back in the river. The fish were in the river doing their thing and laying their eggs. And it was quite incredible how fast nature recovers when you just give it a chance.
[00:09:10] Piers Clark: Excellent. So, we're obviously talking about the stream today, but it would be foolhardy not to mention the ground that's around us. As we've walked along the stream, it's been this sort of spongy black peat rich earth, which feels like in its own right, a unique habitat that needs preserving and protecting.
[00:09:28] Lawrence Gosden: Yeah, for sure it is. This is the water meadow that this valley is founded on, and underneath that is all the chalk, of course, which is providing all of the water through the aquifer for the chalk stream in front of us. But that peat is critical.
[00:09:40] Lawrence Gosden: Another consequence of draining the meadow to create more agriculture was that it started to dry out the peat. Now when that peat dries out, it starts to react, it starts to give off carbon.
[00:09:49] Piers Clark: It's a carbon source, isn't it?
[00:09:51] Lawrence Gosden: Correct . So a wonderful byproduct of doing this work to enable the water meadow to be re wetted, to allow the flood plains to work in the way that they originally did, means that the peat can breathe and it can do what it originally did as well, which means it becomes more of a carbon sink than a carbon fund.
[00:10:09] Piers Clark: Excellent. Okay So, you are reinvigorating seven kilometers along this stretch of stream?
[00:10:14] Lawrence Gosden: That's right. Yeah.
[00:10:15] Piers Clark: And how long do you think it'll take?
[00:10:17] Lawrence Gosden: Oh, it's gonna take years. The first kilometer or so has been done over about two years. But this is the start of a medium term project. And you've gotta do this stuff in harmony with nature.
[00:10:28] Piers Clark: I've gotta ask, what do you know now that you'd wish you'd known at the beginning of the project?
[00:10:33] Lawrence Gosden: Not to panic when you see loads of earth and mounds and you see a battlefield. Don't panic at that point 'cause do you know what?
[00:10:40] Lawrence Gosden: You give nature a chance and it just says, ha ha, human beings. I'll show you. And then it comes back bouncing strong.
[00:10:46] Piers Clark: Now we've got listenership from all across the globe. What advice would you give other water utility execs who might be thinking, Hey, that's an interesting scheme. I wonder if I could do that in my area?
[00:10:58] Lawrence Gosden: The reason we're doing this is about making these kind of rivers, from which we abstract water to give to people in Hampshire, more resilient and robust to climate change.
[00:11:08] Lawrence Gosden: And the way these rivers work, if you allow them to work properly, that means you've got a river temperature that stays cool even throughout the hot summer months . And that's really unique 'cause when you've got a surface water-fed river, that heats up. So if you've got this cool water that's coming in, that means you've got a stable habitat, which is doing its thing to look after the fish.
[00:11:31] Lawrence Gosden: So practically, we are doing this work to make sure that the rivers in this area are more resilient to enable us to abstract supplies in the way that we need to.
[00:11:41] Lawrence Gosden: Water companies and the water cycle is a fascinating thing. I think the days of being able to solve the problems of society related to water using your own assets are gone. There's a little bit maybe left in that you can plug a bit more technology on the end of pipes for sure, but embracing the entire water cycle and looking for solutions in that middle bit in catchments is now a massive part of the armory of water progress.
[00:12:07] Lawrence Gosden: And look, we would love to talk more about this, so if anybody wants to find out a bit more about how practically we've done this, how we've funded it, how we've done some of those more pragmatic elements, then please get in touch. We'd be delighted to share.
[00:12:20] Piers Clark: Projects like this don't happen just 'cause one person's got a good idea. How many people, how many corporations have been involved to make this become a reality?
[00:12:28] Lawrence Gosden: Oh, I would say well over a dozen organizations engaged.
[00:12:33] Piers Clark: Planners to contractors to environmental scientists.
[00:12:36] Lawrence Gosden: For sure but wider than that to landowners , to the Rivers Trust. I mean, this work is done through NGOs. These green skills that you need to be able to do this kind of work is through that route.
[00:12:46] Lawrence Gosden: So the Rivers Trust have been extraordinary. The landowners and some of the associations that are engaging local communities in the project. It's important everybody's involved. This is a nationally significant project and the more that those communities are engaged in that, the more power to their elbow.
[00:13:03] Piers Clark: Excellent. Okay, I'm slightly outta breath because we've just walked up the hill. We're now back at the carpark. It's been absolutely wonderful, Lawrence, taking me around this site and seeing things. I could have spent the whole day doing this.
[00:13:14] Piers Clark: Now, we always finish with a personal question, which is asking you to go back 36 years. What advice would you give a young Lawrence Gosden, if you could speak to him today?
[00:13:23] Lawrence Gosden: Oh, my word got a whole list. I think probably. I was a hugely driven young man who was out for everything and was kind of running at everything at like a million miles an hour. And I think the biggest thing that I've learned over my entire career is the power of just going a little bit slower and just really valuing the people around you.
[00:13:44] Lawrence Gosden: The single most important thing in companies is the people in the companies, and it's a massively obvious statement, but it can get so overlooked.
[00:13:52] Lawrence Gosden: Companies are not just about profit lines, they're about people. They are about the good that people can do when they're in those companies. That's the soul in the business. If you've got soul, then you've got a company that knows why it's in business. And that's extraordinarily powerful.
[00:14:08] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and I have spent a wonderful afternoon wandering around the southeast of England, looking at an astonishing project to re-wiggle the River Anton with the Chief Executive of Southern Water, Lawrence Gosden.
[00:14:26] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.