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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 around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Matt Wheeldon, Infrastructure Development Director at Wessex Water in the UK.
[00:00:17] Piers Clark: Matt, brilliant to have you with us today.
[00:00:19] Matt Wheeldon: Thanks, Piers. It's great to be here.
[00:00:21] Piers Clark: Now, we always start with a potted history of the speaker, so give me in 60 seconds the path that Matt Wheeldon has taken to becoming the Infrastructure Development Director.
[00:00:33] Matt Wheeldon: Having got a civil engineering degree, I joined an engineering consultancy, spent a lot of time working on overseas projects. And then really relocated to Wessex Water as a recently chartered engineer and very quickly moved into senior management. Moved around the company, working in operations, working in asset strategy, working in regulation.
[00:00:53] Matt Wheeldon: And my current role is running the part of the business that interfaces with the retailers in the non-household market. But probably most prominently, I work on the whole narrative around storm overflows and government policy and regulation to enable us to tackle solutions at source rather than end of pipe solutions.
[00:01:14] Matt Wheeldon: On top of that , I'm really keen to promote research. I sit on the UKWIR board and I head up professional development. Helping young people train up to get professional qualifications.
[00:01:25] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Now, we're gonna be talking about stormwater management, or as I think you like to call it, rainwater management. It's managing the rain problem.
But before we get to that, for the audience who don't know Wessex Water, where is Wessex Water? How many people does it serve? What's the scope of services and what do you do?
[00:01:43] Matt Wheeldon: So we're in southwest of England. We basically cover Wiltshire, Somerset, and Dorsett, and Bristol and Bath.
[00:01:49] Matt Wheeldon: Our wastewater business is twice the size of our water supply business. So, we do do both. We have about 2.9 million waste customers and about 1.3 million supply customers. We vary from very urban areas like Bristol and then Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole on the south coast and then a lot of rural areas in between.
[00:02:07] Matt Wheeldon: Interestingly, chalk is a blessing and a curse for us. It's a blessing in that it's a huge reservoir. So from a water resources point of view, we are very blessed 'cause we capture the rain in a large area.
[00:02:18] Piers Clark: You just dig a hole and clean water comes out. Surely that's all you need to do.
[00:02:22] Matt Wheeldon: Well, we don't do much more to be honest. It needs a squirt of chlorine and that's about it. Obviously standards are getting tighter, but because of the capacity of this reservoir, which is an aquifer, in dry summers, we generally do okay.
[00:02:35] Matt Wheeldon: However, like now when the groundwater table is very high, it's a curse because the groundwater table is right up at ground level and it's flooding into all the sewers. And we've got storm overflows happening all the time. We kind of wanna love that middle ground, but we're in extremes.
[00:02:50] Piers Clark: I should say that we are recording this in March 2026, just after we've had about 40 days of rain. And the sun has just begun to peep out. So for those in the southern hemisphere, you'll be thinking, well, March is usually very hot. Of course, in the UK we're just coming out of winter into spring.
[00:03:08] Piers Clark: Alright. Now, when I first met you at a conference, you talked about stormwater management and changing the traditional view that water companies have around stormwater management, and I wanted to capture that narrative here for the benefit of the listeners of this podcast.
[00:03:23] Piers Clark: So, walk me through the Matt Wheeldon ethos of stormwater management / rainwater management .
[00:03:30] Matt Wheeldon: It struck me that there was far too much talk about sewage being dumped in the media, which has caught the imagination of everyone and its total clickbait.
[00:03:39] Matt Wheeldon: So, I really focused on if we want to address storm overflows, the solutions are not about sewage. The solutions are about source control and managing the rain.
[00:03:50] Matt Wheeldon: So it kind of took me down this journey of trying to get to the root cause of the problem and tackle it there. And what that shows us is that if you let a water company fix the problem at the end of pipe: one, is it only tackles that single problem. And Two, it is not sustainable. And three, you're forever going to be defending this position.
[00:04:14] Matt Wheeldon: The problem with storm overflows is too much rain in the sewers. I mean, that's the bottom line. And very few people actually talk about that. You get a lot of people talking about water quality issues, but this is just a water quantity issue. We have too much rain in the winter and we have too little rain in the summer.
[00:04:31] Matt Wheeldon: We get a roughly 800 mil to a thousand mil of rain over the whole of the UK. The amount of water we supply our customers is about 1.6% of the rain that lands on us. And the problem is there's very few actors or organizations collecting this rain in times of plenty, so that when its times of scarcity, it's available to use.
[00:04:52] Matt Wheeldon: Then building on top of that, we've got an infrastructure network that has proved very effective at supplying all of our drinking water needs, and yet we are wasting about a quarter of it to flush our toilets. Gosh, this is high quality drinking water that's been through amazing processes and we are filling our toilets with it.
[00:05:13] Matt Wheeldon: And then on the other side, we're adding this rain to the sewage. And then we've got this horrible problem of storm overflows, which clearly everyone is really annoyed about.
[00:05:21] Matt Wheeldon: The problem is the way our homes are built, the way our homes are run, it's not the person who owns the home's problem. It's just that's the way they've inherited the problem from the way in which the building was built.
[00:05:33] Matt Wheeldon: So, water companies are busy trying to solve these water scarcity and too much rain issues miles away from where the problem is, the problems in the home.
[00:05:42] Piers Clark: We need an Infrastructure Development Director to sort of try and break the cycle here. That's what we need.
[00:05:46] Matt Wheeldon: Indeed. But breaking the cycle by tackling the problem at source is easier said than done. First of all, you've gotta get people to start talking about it, and that's really where I've landed on these six words: "Manage rain better where it lands" to try and summarize what we need to do.
[00:06:03] Matt Wheeldon: Now, I don't use the words integrated, holistic, catchment, systems. These are great words for us techie people who understand it, but it doesn't fly with the public.
[00:06:15] Piers Clark: It alienates people when they hear that, they immediately shut down. Joe Public will immediately shut down 'cause that just sounds like engineering guff.
[00:06:23] Matt Wheeldon: It's great words, but it doesn't fly. So, manage rain better where it lands. Why? Because it's a natural resource that we're wasting.
[00:06:31] Matt Wheeldon: And it's based on two simple principles, and I try and keep the message as simple as possible.
One, rain is a resource. We should capture it, reuse it where possible.
[00:06:40] Matt Wheeldon: And two, we should return it back to the environment as close to where it first landed.
[00:06:44] Piers Clark: Moving water from one catchment to another and thinking that we're not messing with the ecosystem and the diversity. It's criminal.
[00:06:52] Matt Wheeldon: And people forget how heavy water is. It's unbelievably heavy compared to all other utilities, and we shift it horizontally, artificially.
[00:07:01] Matt Wheeldon: Now, obviously rain goes downhill naturally, but we push it uphill. The water that comes to your tap in Wessex Water, we have lifted it 130 meters to reach your tap.
[00:07:11] Matt Wheeldon: That's a huge amount of energy and a quarter of that's pointless because our customers are using it to flush their toilets. So, trying to show people the madness of our system and what we're about to do by building one and a half million homes in exactly the same way.
[00:07:26] Matt Wheeldon: And then the madness trying to fix the storm overflows by storing this rain so that we can then treat it when actually, generally the ground will take it and you can start to enhance how the ground takes it through soak aways. We should be looking at local disposal in order to stop the problem at source.
[00:07:41] Matt Wheeldon: The multiple layered benefits are huge and we're doing lots of research work on that right now to demonstrate the benefits of managing rain better where it lands compared to the centralized solutions that we're spending billions on.
[00:07:52] Piers Clark: I love it. This is exactly the message you were giving at the conference where I first met you, and it's a beautiful narrative, which is why I didn't interrupt because it's such a great story that you're telling.
[00:08:03] Piers Clark: Now, can you bring everybody on board, not just the public and the regulators, but also the other water companies?
[00:08:08] Piers Clark: How confident are you that you can make a substantive change to what we do? We've got embedded infrastructure, embedded ways of doing things. It's gotta be a cultural shift as much as an engineering and technical shift.
[00:08:20] Matt Wheeldon: Absolutely! You've gotta convert the mind and we are seeing that. Two, three weeks ago, early February, we had the water minister using those same words in parliament.
[00:08:29] Piers Clark: Your magical words: manage rain better where it lands?
[00:08:32] Matt Wheeldon: Yes. And then you had influential people like Dieter Helm writing about this on a paper that he posted on LinkedIn.
[00:08:39] Matt Wheeldon: Other companies are bought into this, believe me, they are. You know, Anglian Water who have been running enabling water smart communities, which is just exactly what this is all about. British Water representing the supply chain. They wrote a paper on managing rain better where it lands.
[00:08:52] Matt Wheeldon: And I'm speaking to a large number of environmental NGOs and encouraging them to repeat the message because actually people will listen to them more than they'll listen to a water company. So I've Been really encouraging the wildlife trust, the rivers trust to start ' cause we're on the same page here. We don't want to destroy the environment by trying to fix a problem in the environment.
[00:09:12] Piers Clark: I assume there aren't really any naysayers. There isn't really an argument you can make for, "Oh, Matt, what are you talking about? This is ridiculous."
I suppose there's an extra cost that needs to be put in, but a saving then that comes from the alleviation of all the problems that happen later on.
[00:09:26] Matt Wheeldon: Long-term, progressive, sustainable solutions. That's what it is. And that's what happens if you do source control. Our legislation and regulation should be biased towards the right long-term sustainable solutions. And at the moment it's not, it's biased towards centralized solutions.
[00:09:40] Matt Wheeldon: I have not met a single person who's disagreed with the principle. So, I wanna just wanna get it out there and I want everyone to start repeating this because a common narrative that's simpler to understand will get traction and then people will start talking about it and then people go, how do we do that? How do we do it?
[00:09:55] Matt Wheeldon: And you can't do one single change. It's a systemic change required in legislation, regulation, education, technical guidance and economic incentives.
[00:10:04] Piers Clark: Talk me through some timelines. What are you expecting to happen, what would you hope would happen over the next few years?
[00:10:10] Matt Wheeldon: Legislation's already being discussed. I'm already working with Defra on tweaks that push legislation to be bias towards source control solutions than centralized solutions. How long it takes to go through, what actually ends up going through? We'll wait and see.
[00:10:23] Matt Wheeldon: Water reform regulation is ripe on the agenda. Here's an opportunity to start measuring source control solutions rather than just outputs like spills, and saying actually the square meters removed from the combined sewer is an important metric. We should be measuring that and incentivizing that, rather than just being fixed on spill numbers because how you achieve spill numbers matters for the environment.
[00:10:46] Matt Wheeldon: The research that we're doing through UKWIR is really important. We're doing a project to answer this question: "What is the evidence that managing rain better where it lands for both new build properties and retrofitting existing properties is better economically for society and the environment than centralized solutions?" and I'm confident the answer will be managing rain better where it lands is better.
So in October at the World Water Congress in Glasgow, I'm running a forum called rainwater management. And we are getting people from overseas who are more progressive in their thinking to come and share their experience of how they got there.
I'm hoping to get one of the world's strongest men there to try and lift the weight of water that people waste each day. And I can guarantee you now he won't be able to lift it, which is quite a nice visual thing to see.
[00:11:33] Piers Clark: I do love the idea that this is both about being able to communicate to the technical people and explaining what they need to do. And it's a stunt, a strong man lifting 180 kilos, it'll get headlines. It will be the sort of thing that suddenly makes people sit up and be aware of it and become part of the conversation.
[00:11:50] Piers Clark: So it's wonderful Matt, and people who want to connect with you can either come and see you at the IWA Congress in October in Glasgow or they can reach out to you via LinkedIn, I assume.
[00:12:00] Piers Clark: Now, we're running outta time on this and so let's jump to the final question, which is a contemplative one. If you could go back 20, 30 years, what advice would you give yourself?
[00:12:11] Matt Wheeldon: I think the advice I would give myself would be look around at what we've got. I grew up in a privileged English background where I turned the tap on and out came water and I went to the toilet and flushed it and disappeared, and I didn't care for it.
[00:12:25] Matt Wheeldon: My eyes weren't opened until I didn't have it. And the gap year in the middle of Kenya with no running water and no sanitation opened my eyes to that. We don't appreciate what we've got here in this country. So rather than being angry about storm overflows or water bills, it's being thankful that when I turn the tap on, this beautiful clean stuff comes out and when I flush the toilet, I don't have to deal with that problem.
[00:12:49] Matt Wheeldon: Gratefulness and thankfulness bring happiness and contentment. So, that would be my advice.
[00:12:54] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Matt Wheeldon, Infrastructure Development Director at Wessex Water, and we've been talking about, you can either call it source control for rainwater, or a better phrase might be manage rain better where it lands.
[00:13:12] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.