Harnessing Reuse: Reflections on the Cunliffe Report
The Independent Water Commission report, known as the Cunliffe Report, published in July 2025, marks one of the most comprehensive reviews of the UK’s water sector in decades. It paints a sobering picture of ageing assets, rising pollution, climate change pressures, and fragmented regulation. Yet the report is not just a diagnosis, it lays out a bold prescription for reform, urging the sector to rethink how water is managed, governed, and reused to build resilience for future generations.
Data Centres drink up water sources due to cooling requirements. The Cunliffe Report looks to address how this can be managed better.
Photo by Ian Battaglia on Unsplash
Reform as a Catalyst for Innovation
At the heart of the report is a recommendation to establish a single integrated water regulator, with responsibilities supported by newly created regional water authorities working at a local, river-basin scale. This restructuring is more than administrative tidying. It is about creating the right framework to foster collaboration and accountability. Importantly, the reforms open the door to a “regulatory sandbox”: an environment where innovative approaches to water and wastewater management can be tested, scaled, and embedded across the UK.
Unlocking the Potential of Wastewater Reuse
This new regulatory landscape provides the opportunity to embrace what the Cunliffe Report rightly highlights as one of the most critical frontiers: wastewater harvesting and reuse. Instead of treating wastewater as an end-of-pipe problem, the report urges us to recognise it as a resource; one that can reduce pressure on freshwater supplies, improve environmental outcomes, and help future-proof urban and industrial infrastructure.
Stormwater management is another major focus. By capturing and reusing rainwater, cities can not only reduce flood risks and avoid overloading sewers and treatment plants, but also create valuable new sources of supply, closing the loop in the urban water cycle.
The Big Users: Data Centres, Nuclear, and Beyond
The report makes clear that water reuse must extend beyond municipal supply into industries where demand is set to soar.
Data centres: The UK already relies heavily on water for digital infrastructure cooling, and with AI growth driving up computing demand, the strain is only increasing. Just this year, the UK government asked cloud users to delete photos to ease pressure on data centres: a reminder of how digital convenience translates into real environmental stress. Harnessing wastewater for cooling is one of the most effective ways to reduce this footprint, and support this has been voiced in the press by water service companies.
Nuclear reactors: Small Modular Reactors are planned for help meeting the growing energy demand from data centres and other industry. Long-term cooling requirements make reuse a vital safeguard against freshwater dependency, avoiding the increasing clashes with communities and farmers that are being witnessed around the world.
Hospitals and hotels: With constant, predictable demand and large volumes of greywater, these facilities are ideal candidates for decentralised reuse (recycling water for laundry, toilets, cooling, and landscaping).
Commercial hubs: Offices and retail parks can also implement closed-loop reuse, reducing costs and improving sustainability credentials.
In each case, the common thread is clear: water reuse is not just an environmental imperative. It is a business opportunity.
Decentralised, sustainable solutions such as ALGAESYS will help to accomplish what the report sets out to achieve.
ALGAESYS and the Future of Water Reuse
For ALGAESYS, the Cunliffe Report reads like a roadmap we are already following. Our nature-based, decentralised wastewater treatment systems are designed precisely for the kind of resource recovery and reuse envisioned in the report.
By working at multiple scales, our solutions can:
Recover water for data centre and nuclear reactor cooling, reducing the draw on local supplies.
Enable hospital and hotel reuse systems, delivering both cost savings and sustainability gains.
Integrate into urban stormwater networks, turning a flood risk into a valuable resource.
As the UK water sector prepares to act on the Commission’s recommendations, we see enormous potential for innovation and collaboration. Reuse will not only help address water scarcity but will also protect ecosystems, strengthen communities, and enable industries to thrive sustainably.
At ALGAESYS, we are proud to be at the forefront of this transition, turning wastewater into opportunity, and opportunity into resilience.