United Utilities



From Crewe to Carlisle, our offices and water and wastewater treatment works span the North West of England.

We gather our water from a range of different sources, but predominantly from our reservoirs in the Pennines and the Lake District. We extract water from Lake Vyrnwy in Wales for customers in Merseyside and Cheshire, while the rest is taken from the River Dee, boreholes and streams.

Of the 1.9 billion litres we supply every day, well over half is from Cumbria and Wales. The two biggest reservoirs are Thirlmere and Haweswater in Cumbria. Haweswater holds more than 84,800 million litres of water - equivalent to around 33,900 Olympic swimming pools.

We own and manage over 56,000 hectares of land, making us the largest corporate landowner in England.

Much of this is catchment land (the areas immediately surrounding our reservoirs). We recognise that quality control starts right at the point of collection, so we keep our catchment land as clean and sustainable as we can. This helps with the water quality for our customers and makes a huge difference to the environment.


We help protect over 400km of coastline and around 7,000km of rivers flowing across the region. We provide an essential services as the water and water and wastewater provider in the North West, from Crewe to Carlisle.


Our approach and principles are to adopt SuDS proposed that comply with the CIRIA SuDS Manual and Design and Construction Guidance. We support consultants and developers to help develop proposals into adoptable designs.

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