Thames Water Pairs Drainage With Street Repairs

Ofwat funding will let Thames Water and London officials test installing drainage during routine streetworks.

21 May 2026

Thames Water has secured funding from Ofwat's Water Innovation Fund to test a new way of scaling up sustainable drainage: building it into streetworks the utility was already planning. The project, called SuDS through Streetworks Market, is valued at more than 7.6 million pounds and is being delivered with the Greater London Authority.

It targets a long standing coordination problem. London alone sees roughly 186,000 streetworks projects in an average year, largely to maintain utility networks and highways. Officials say incentivizing drainage installation during that existing work, rather than through separate excavation projects, could produce what the partners describe as a quantum shift in delivery volumes.

Funding comes from the sixth Water Breakthrough Challenge, part of a ten year, 600 million pound Water Innovation Fund. That single round distributed 58 million pounds across 19 projects nationally, aimed at problems ranging from ageing asset upgrades to the disruption planned works cause communities.

According to officials familiar with the sector, local authorities, developers and utilities have long struggled to align separate approval processes for drainage and streetworks. Analysts said coordinating the two could open up opportunities that standalone capital schemes, with their own delays and costs, have failed to capture.

Questions remain about how easily the model will scale beyond a single pilot, though. Its backers are betting that findings from London will translate into national practice, treating sustainable drainage as a routine part of infrastructure maintenance rather than a specialist workstream requiring its own funding and timeline.

How well that bet pays off could shape drainage delivery well beyond London in the years ahead. The results, once in, are likely to inform policy on integrating sustainable drainage into everyday infrastructure work nationwide.