You rely on us to supply top-quality drinking water to your taps 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Despite our ongoing programme to upgrade our infrastructure, burst pipes, site failures or third-party damage to our network can sometimes happen.
Our target for 2023/24 was for each property we serve to be impacted on average by an interruption for less than 5.4 minutes.
How have we performed?
The average interruption during the year was 44.74 minutes per property which resulted in a £3.3 million underperformance payment. Our performance in 2023/24 was a severely impacted by two large events. The largest being the summer supply/demand event in early June 2023 along with the Maidenbower/Copthorne event in late May, as a result of the loss of our bulk water supply from Southern Water. These along with another smaller event contributed to 27.33 minutes of the total 44.74 minutes.
Outside of these events we saw our underlying performance equate to 17.41 customer minutes of which seven events were over one minute in duration and were the result of bursts on difficult to repair trunk mains and accounted for 11.06 minutes, the remaining 6.35 minutes were spread over smaller interruptions.
We continue to operate an improvement programme to help identify, track and implement new initiatives to help reduce interruptions to your supply. This programme includes network learning and incident management workshops which have been running throughout the year.
In summary, as we move into the last year of the financial period, we are focusing on delivering infrastructure improvements in our Kent and Sussex regions to provide more resilience against the extreme weather events which have been the main contributor to our ODI performance and target failure.
This is also mirrors the regional approach we are taking for our PR24 business plan which serves to address these particular issues, as it is only a small number of events that are contributing to failure of this ODI target. These events are predominantly in our Sussex region, with better performance seen in Kent, and if our western region were its own company, it would be in the top quarter with less than one minute lost per property. This is because we have greater resilience, network connectivity and capability to transfer water across our western region.
