An independent expert review of Southern Water’s Beachbuoy tool has highlighted strengths and areas for further improvement.

The assessment of the web-based service, which provides near real-time information about storm release activity close to coastal bathing waters, covered four key topic areas:

• water quality
• oceanographic modelling
• user and engagement
• software and systems.

The aim of the review was to provide an assessment of the system’s ability to provide consistent, reliable and credible warnings of potential water quality impacts from storm overflow releases - plus a series of recommendations to improve the accuracy and user trustworthiness and confidence of the system.

The scope of the review, and the questions to be answered within it, were written following engagement with key stakeholders on a ‘user group’, including campaigners.

The review highlighted the strength of Beachbuoy’s compliance with industry standards and excellent spill reporting. Areas of improvement identified by the report include increasing the size of the user group, and efforts to make the tool more user friendly and provide a greater level of detail.

Nick Mills, Head of Southern Water’s Clean Rivers and Seas Task Force, said:

“Transparency and monitoring are vital to the improvements we’re prioritising across our business. This includes our commitment to continuously evolve Beachbuoy to best suit water users across our region, by providing near real-time information about storm overflow activity.

“The independent expert review we commissioned, in collaboration with our community user group, described Beachbuoy as a ‘valuable resource of data’ for the public, and commended its open data sharing with regulators, while recommending some areas of improvement. We have already addressed or are implementing several of these points, and publicly set out how we will action all remaining recommendations and by when

“We are absolutely committed to reducing storm overflows across our region. This is why we recently announced our £1.5 billion Clean Rivers and Seas Plan to protect and enhance our environment.”

The key outcome from the review was a series of recommendations for Southern Water, which have been split in to short, medium and long-term actions. The recommendations include ensuring all known outfalls are included, and exceptions identified, and achieving closer to real-time updating.

Southern Water will now start to implement the recommendations as part of the updates made to Beachbuoy.

Click here to download the full report