CEO Blog: 40 Years of Delivering the Groundwork: Why AMP8 Needs Innovators, Suppliers & Contractors

By Paul Horton, CEO of Future Water

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Standing in the room at One Great George Street for our 40th Anniversary and Future Water Awards, it was impossible not to feel the weight - and the energy - of four decades of history.

When the Society of British Water Industries (SBWI) was formed 40 years ago, the predecessor of Future Water, our sector operated in a fundamentally different world. Yet looking across a room packed with innovators, contractors, engineers, and digital pioneers, one reality stood out clearly: the supply chain has always carried the water.

Throughout 2026, my blogs have tracked an industry under intense scrutiny. In January, we addressed governance and public trust. February took on the Cunliffe review. Spring and summer explored data maturity, clear communication, cyber threats, and systemic drought resilience.

Now, as the sector enters the delivery engine of AMP8, conversations across Whitehall and utility boardrooms have fixed on one phrase: “supply chain capacity.”

Too often, that phrase is uttered with anxiety - framed as a bottleneck, a shortage of sites, or a deficit of skills. But our 40th celebration proved the opposite: the UK water sector does not have an idea or capability deficit. It has an adoption and commercial deficit.

The Room That Actually Builds the Future

When mainstream commentary discusses water, it tends to focus on financial structures, regulatory penalties, and political posturing. But pipes are not laid by press releases, and storm overflows are not curtailed by parliamentary committees.

The people in the room at One Great George Street are the ones who design the sensors, invent trenchless repair methods, and deploy AI-driven acoustics.

Our Water Dragons Alumni Showcase demonstrated that practical ingenuity is thriving. For nearly two decades, Water Dragons has brought hundreds of agile entrepreneurs forward to pitch solutions to the sector's most persistent headaches. From satellite monitoring to real-time biofilm detection and non-invasive metering, the answers to our capital challenges are already here.

Why, then, does it still take years for proven technologies to scale across frameworks? If AMP8 is to succeed, we must bridge the "valley of death" between a successful trial and widespread operational adoption. We cannot afford another five years where brilliant SMEs spend more energy navigating procurement bureaucracy than deploying their solutions in the ground.

People Over Procurement

The highlights of our awards evening were the Emerging Talent, People, and Above and Beyond categories.

Listening to the stories of apprentices, graduate engineers, and veteran field operators was an essential corrective to the prevailing industry narrative. We talk endlessly about capital expenditure, but our most critical asset is human capital.

AMP8 requires an unprecedented influx of multidisciplinary skills:

• Civil and mechanical engineers who know how to rebuild Victorian infrastructure.
• Data scientists and systems architects who turn raw telemetry into actionable insight.
• Environmental specialists who can deliver nature-based catchment solutions alongside traditional concrete assets.

If we treat the supply chain as a transactional tier - squeezing margins and passing down unmanageable risk - we will lose this talent to other infrastructure sectors. To attract and retain the bright minds celebrated in our Emerging Talent category, water must be an exciting, stable, and rewarding place to build a career.

Moving from Risk-Shifting to Risk-Sharing

As we mark 40 years as an association, we must be honest about what the next 40 years require.

The old procurement playbook - lowest-cost compliance, adversarial contracts, and shifting macro-risks onto Tier-2 and Tier-3 suppliers - is broken. It suppresses innovation, delays delivery, and destabilizes balance sheets.

If water companies and regulators genuinely want the supply chain to gear up for the £90bn+ investment pipeline, three shifts must happen immediately:

• True Commercial Collaboration: Frameworks must evolve into long-term enterprise partnerships where risk and reward are genuinely shared, giving suppliers the confidence to invest in plant, automation, and local jobs.
• Fast-Track Innovation Corridors: Tested solutions—proven through Water Dragons and trial funds—need simplified, direct routes into asset management plans without forcing innovators to start from scratch with every single regional water company.
• Valuing Outcomes Over Outputs: Procurement must reward carbon reduction, asset longevity, and ecosystem health, rather than defaulting to the cheapest capital outlay.

The Next 40 Years Start Now

From the early days of the SBWWI to the complex, data-led network of Future Water in 2026, our members have proven their resilience time and again. We saw that same spirit celebrated through projects like Team Nautilus and across every award presented on stage.

The reviews have been written. The targets are set. The water sector will be defined not by the targets it publishes, but by what gets delivered in the field.

To water company leaders, regulators, and policy makers: the supply chain is ready, willing, and capable. Back them, collaborate with them, and give them the commercial certainty to build the water network this country deserves.

Here’s to the next 40 years.

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