Welcome to our performance report for 2024/24
We have made good progress on delivering on the commitments and ambitious targets we set out in our five-year plan. We have completed a number of key engineering projects which will improve climate change resilience and flexibility across our network and we are continuing to deliver on our commitment to invest £489 million into our network by 2025.
Our customers rightly expect us to provide a reliable supply of high-quality drinking water that is good value for money. Alongside this, we’ll always do our best to deliver excellent customer service by supporting the needs of our 2.3 million customers.
We’ve published our revised draft Water Resources Management Plan 2024 which explains how we’ll invest in providing a reliable and resilient drinking water supply over the longer term. And in October we submitted our most ambitious business plan to date, for the period 2025 to 2030, which includes a wide range of investment to improve service delivery to our customers and the resilience of our infrastructure to an increasing set of challenges.
Planning ahead and investing in important projects not only helps us provide a reliable supply of high-quality drinking water to customers; it also helps us to protect the environment and ensure it thrives. We recently launched our 25-year Environment Plan. This sets out the actions we will take to protect and enhance the environment now and in the future, and we are very proud of the work we continue to do in this area, above and beyond our statutory obligations.
We are working proactively with others to improve the quality of water at source as well as our rivers and chalk aquifers. A successful engagement programme with landowners is helping to increase their sustainability and resilience through funding towards rain harvesting systems, water efficiency advice and training. As part of the King’s Series of National Nature Reserves, we’re collaborating on an exciting project to create a new Super National Nature Reserve in the South Downs to enhance biodiversity and climate resilience. We’ve worked with communities and conservation groups to plant thousands of trees and protect a wide variety of species including water voles, beavers, wart-biter bush crickets, butterflies and bumblebees.
Our partnership approach to supporting vulnerable customers and to reaching more customers who may be struggling with the cost-of-living crisis is something we are extremely proud of.
Our reaccreditation to the Inclusive Service Kitemark, our investment in new Community Partnership Leads and a 39 per cent rise in our Priority Service Register numbers are all testament to our industry-leading work in this area. We’re also introducing a new structured social tariff system as a result of feedback from customers and stakeholders.
Through our AquaSmart schools initiative, we’ve helped children learn about the importance of looking after water, and we’ve given away more than 180,000 water-saving devices to support our customers to use water wisely. We’ve also supported the local communities we serve through our Community Chest funding scheme for community and charitable projects.
Over the past year we have again faced challenges as we have strived to meet these high standards. We had the hottest June on record with record-breaking demand for water, followed by one of the wettest winters ever with severe storms causing power cuts and flooding. We are working hard to ensure our service is resilient to the changing climate and growing population and we are doing everything we possibly can to minimise the impact of these extreme weather events on our customers and also on the environment. The lessons we learned from the 2022 drought did indeed help us prepare for last summer, however customer demand increased so quickly in June that we couldn’t treat and pump water fast enough into the network. This was despite producing an extra 138 million litres of water a day to try and meet the demand.
I am sorry to all our customers who were affected by these incidents and I would like to assure you that we review every event to inform our future planning, investment and operational response. Our new AquAlerter customer messaging system is one improvement we’ve made to ensure we communicate more effectively with customers during incidents.
We’ll continue to invest significantly into our network to improve customer service, reduce supply interruptions, lower leakage levels and strengthen network resilience while supporting customers to help us save water and helping the environment to thrive.
Summary tables
Below you’ll find our summary tables for each group of measures providing an overview of our performance for this year.
TBC = Ofwat will review our performance against the rest of the industry and inform us of our ranking and the resulting incentive.
To see previous years performance, please click on that particular measure.
* These are forecast underperformance payments.
Outcome
Unit
2022/23 performance
2023/24 performance target
2023/24 performance
Incentive type and £
Hectares
8,289.9
11,374
11,880.93
2024/25 incentive
Outcome
Unit
2022/23 performance
2023/24 target
2023/24 performance
Score out of 5
4.2
4.5
4.3
Score out of 5
4.1
4.4
4.1
Score out of 5
3.3
4.0
3.3
Score out of 5
3.3
3.9
3.4
Commitment
Unit
2022/23 Performance
2023/24 Performance
Responsible business commitments
Develop a future generation schools programme
Create more partnership community projects on water use and vulnerability
Support the tap water refill campaign to reduce plastic bottled water
Play an active role regionally in relation to the impact of housing growth
Improving health safety and wellbeing of our people and communities
Ensure fair pay, reward and recognition for all our employees