We’re proud members of the Future Water Association, and their recent Impact Report 2025 struck a chord with us in a way many sector reports don’t.

In his foreword, Chair Mark Smith highlights the principle of “having the honest conversation”, creating space to talk openly about performance, capability, resilience, and public trust, not defensively but constructively.

That sentiment is absolutely right. And it’s one we would wholeheartedly support.

But…

while this ethos might be increasingly visible at an industry and association level, it is still rarely embedded consistently at organisational level. Too often, the workforce conversation in water remains reactive, disjointed and siloed.

Paul Horton, CEO of Future Water Association, is explicit about the scale of the challenge. He notes that no single organisation can solve the sector’s issues alone. They require shared leadership, collective learning, and a willingness to rethink what “good” looks like.

Crucially, he also highlights that one of the clearest risks to long‑term sector resilience remains workforce sustainability:

• Too many experienced professionals are leaving
• Too few new entrants are coming through
• The pace of regulatory, technical, and environmental change is accelerating
• And the skills gap is widening, not narrowing

This assessment reflects what we see consistently across programmes, frameworks and alliances. It also mirrors the conclusions coming through in wider industry workforce analysis, including our own research into labour dynamics, capacity risk, and experience attrition across the UK water sector.

Organisations are grappling with:

• Loss of institutional knowledge at mid‑ and senior‑levels
• Over‑reliance on a shrinking pool of experienced individuals
• Delivery models that assume capability exists, rather than evidencing it
• Workforce decisions being made downstream of programme commitments, not upstream

The honest conversation, when it does happen, often starts too late.

The real test for AMP8 and beyond, isn’t whether the sector acknowledges these risks. It’s whether organisations are prepared to act on them early, openly and collectively.

That means:

• Being realistic about capacity, not just outputs
• Rethinking how experience, progression and retention are structured
• Treating workforce sustainability as a core resilience issue, not an HR sub‑thread
• And learning together, rather than attempting to solve in isolation

Future Water Association is creating the space for these conversations at a sector level.

The next step is ensuring that the same honesty, evidence‑based thinking, and long‑term perspective is reflected inside organisations, where delivery pressure is felt most acutely and where workforce decisions have their greatest consequence.

Workforce sustainability isn’t a future risk. It’s an historical and, very much, present constraint.