Nobody wants to own the pipes
Why long-term stewardship is the hardest question in water smart development — and how three sites answered it.
By the Water Smart Community of Practice team · April 2026 · 6 min read
Every conversation about water smart development eventually arrives at the same question, and it is never the one people expect. It is not whether greywater reuse works, or what rainwater harvesting costs. It is: who owns this in thirty years?
The question that gets deferred
Across three demonstrator developments, we watched the same pattern. Technical design progressed quickly. Cost modelling progressed quickly. The stewardship question — who holds the asset, who maintains it, who pays when it needs replacing — moved slowly, and often not at all, until it became urgent.
By then the masterplan was fixed. The pipe runs were set. The options that remained were the expensive ones.
Why it is hard
A community water system does not fit the structures we have. It is too small for a water company to adopt without a clear regulatory route. It is too technical for a residents' management company to run unsupported. It is too long-lived for a developer to hold beyond the sales period.
Each of the three models we identified solves part of this, and none solves all of it:
- Public or local-authority-led works where an authority has genuine long-term capacity — which is rarer than it sounds.
- Community-led works where residents have both appetite and access to technical support, designed in from the start.
- Utility partnership is the most operationally robust, and depends entirely on an adoption route existing.
The model matters less than deciding it early. Any of the three, chosen at masterplan stage, beats the best of them chosen at handover.
What we would tell a developer starting now
Answer the stewardship question in the same meeting where you set the water ambition. Not the meeting after. The decision determines what infrastructure is worth building, and building infrastructure before you know who will run it is how good schemes become stranded assets.
Read more
Our full report, Water stewardship models for new developments, sets out all three models with cost, risk and durability comparisons, and includes model agreements for community-led schemes.