The Cunliffe Review represents a meaningful shift in how the UK water sector could be regulated in the future. Its emphasis on regional planning, strengthened regulation, and enhanced resilience signals an inflection point for how infrastructure is delivered and by whom.

The report is all-encompassing, layered and far reaching and I recognise it is difficult to offer a succinct summary that will offer an adequate level of insight to a broad audience, given our place within the sector, I have a natural bias to human-capital considerations and the associated benefits/challenges and so; this article summarises key recommendations from the report, highlights implications for employers (particularly in engineering and asset management), and links to the broader workforce availability challenges outlined in our Water Industry Labour Report 2025.

Headline Findings from the Cunliffe Report:

Regional Strategic Planning:

• Advocates for the creation of Regional Water Resource Planners to coordinate investment and resilience.
• Recommends greater integration between water and environmental planning.

Regulatory Reform:

• Supports giving Ofwat greater powers to enforce long-term planning.
• Encourages outcome-based regulation over rigid process oversight.

Workforce and Delivery Capability:

• Calls out a shortage in technical and operational talent across the sector.
• References our Water Industry Labour Report 2025 in identifying the immediate and long-term labour challenges.

Transparency and Accountability:

• Recommends clearer reporting of water companies' performance, both financial and environmental.

Employer Implications: Regional Planning Structure

• A regional approach could lead to more consistent project pipelines, enabling better workforce planning.
• May increase demand for regional leadership roles in strategy, engineering, and stakeholder engagement.
• Opportunities to align apprenticeship and education partnerships to regional skills needs.
• Raises questions about how talent mobility and contractor frameworks will operate across regions.

Employer Implications: Regulatory Reform

• Outcome-based regulation may require multidisciplinary thinking, placing greater emphasis on soft skills, cross-sector experience, and systems-level thinking.
• Potential for increased scrutiny on project delivery performance could elevate the importance of talent acquisition, retention, and contractor governance.
• Could drive demand for talent with commercial, data, and environmental insight.

Recruitment and Talent Considerations:

As identified in the Water Industry Labour Report 2025, there are significant gaps in:

• Civil, mechanical and electrical engineering professionals.
• Skilled project managers and programme engineers.
• Environmental specialists and data technicians.

The Cunliffe Review reinforces the need for:

• Sustained investment in early careers talent.
• Improved access to portable upskilling for contingent workers.
• Smarter deployment of temporary labour and interim resource to manage peaks.

Conclusion:

The direction of travel outlined in the Cunliffe Review is largely welcome. It supports a vision for the water sector that is more resilient, more accountable, and more capable of long-term delivery. For employers, however, the challenge is clear: none of this can happen without a robust and well-supported workforce.

Our view is that regulatory reform and regional planning must go hand-in-hand with talent reform, this means new ways of thinking about recruitment, workforce planning, and contractor partnerships; the considerations are far more layered than they, perhaps, have ever been and there will be more pressure, and expectation, placed on grass-roots initiatives and cross-sector (including supply chains) multi-agency partnerships.

Download the full Water Industry Labour Report 2025 here or contact us on info@murraymcintosh.com for strategic workforce advice aligned to AMP8 and beyond.

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