This is the Notion page of the EWSC Enabling Action Project: Stewardship. The innovation project brings together cross-sector expertise from water, housing, planning, community wealth building, innovation management, and strategic design. Partners include United Utilities, Community Land Trust Network, CLES, and Arup. Together, they are exploring:

How might we transition from traditional approaches to managing new residential housing in both the private and social sectors — relying on service charges and grounds maintenance — to models offering mutually operated stewardship that genuinely benefit communities and can capture and share water’s value in perpetuity.

Here, you’ll find research insights and the EWSC Water Stewardship Blueprint, which highlights opportunities for water stewardship across the stages of housing development at the site specific scale.

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1. Rethinking Stewardship

EWSC Community. Illustration by Arup for the EWSC project, 2023.

Stewardship in general is a complex, multi-faceted issue that requires a variety of stakeholders with different agendas to organise, collaborate, and align their efforts. This process involves not only the design and implementation of stewardship models and strategies but also the ongoing maintenance and adaptation of those over time.

Since June 2024, the partnership has worked to gain a deeper understanding of the role water plays in sustainable housing development and looked for ways to advocate for its consideration.

To reach the Labour Governments target of 1.5 million new homes, any new housing development should aim to invest in stewardship early to maximise the benefits it brings both to asset management and to placemaking. There is a building evidence base of the benefits of stewardship of common assets like shared land, but water remains an elusive aspiration. Stewardship works to ensure that assets are properly looked after in perpetuity delivering wider benefits to people and nature and its consideration will be necessary to look after water as a common good and underpin the enabling part **of water smart communities.

However, for water stewardship to be truly effective, it must be integrated into broader stewardship efforts from the outset. This is crucial for not only managing assets but also ensuring long-term success in maintaining and adapting them to meet evolving needs.

“Water management should not be considered in isolation but as part of a wider approach to landscape and public realm design and stewardship ” - Homes England

As we continue to explore ways to incorporate water as a shared resource within housing developments, it is essential to recognise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. The mechanisms for models are unique to place, type and tenure of housing development and wider sector systems barriers including land prices, regulation and finance.

Some of the benefits that community-led stewardship can unlock:

Potentially not for profit status may lead to lower charges.
Potential wealth creation within the local community – role in job creation and reducing wealth extraction.
Accountable and democratic to the community.
Opportunity to engage with anchor institutions for enhanced longer term commitments.
Builds inclusivity between new and existing neighbourhoods and wider sense of place.
Bring in (potentially) wider community of benefit to developers to acquire planning permission and have positive engagement with councils.
Supports Corporate Social Responsibility reporting. </aside>

2. Our Approach

Our workstream operates within the challenging and multifaceted domain of water asset stewardship, which involves multiple stakeholders at different levels of the system. To navigate this complexity and ensure a structured approach to deliver innovation in this field, we have aligned our evidence-led approach with the Design Council’s Double Diamond framework. This framework provides a structured, four-stage process – Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver – that allows for both broad exploration and focused refinement.

Over the past few months, the project team has conducted a series of different activities ranging from interviews, surveys, focus groups, workshops and webinars, bringing together different expertise from the housing, stewardship, and water sectors, including representatives from local authorities, developers, water companies, stewardship experts, Homes England, Future Homes Hub and TCPA. These insights have been distilled into a blueprint aligned with the housing development pipeline.

The blueprint is designed to be a living document and tool for use in workshops, emphasising the importance of planning for water stewardship at every stage of development—from master planning to the long-term management of water assets. It summarises key barriers and opportunities throughout the development process, with a particular focus on communal assets in the public realm of new-build estates, such as sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), rather than the retrofitting of existing water infrastructure.

Learn more about the blueprint and how to use it here:

EWSC Water Stewardship Blueprint

EWSC Water Stewardship Bluepint_2.jpg

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1. Rethinking Stewardship

2. Our Approach

3. Key Insights