Introduction by Oliver Martin, Regulation and Strategy Director

We are entrusted to deliver a safe and reliable supply of top-quality drinking water and to meet the challenges of a growing population and climate change through investment, innovation and improved resilience.

Providing safe, reliable supply of drinking water to homes and commercial premises across our region is at the very heart of our business. We are proud of the quality of our water and the teams who produce it.

It is vital we have the trust of our consumers at all times. To maintain it we constantly monitor our performance against the expectations through a range of measures, including the taste and smell of our tap water and interruption to supply. Trust is also the cornerstone of our ‘licence to operate’.

This year our ability to provide a trusted and reliable service has been severely challenged by the impacts of climate change.

Our UKAS-accredited specialist laboratory at Farnborough in Hampshire conducted more than 500,000 water quality tests in the last year. These were conducted at all stages of the treatment process, from our raw water catchments through to customers’ taps, with 99.98 per cent of final water samples passing the Drinking Water Inspectorate’s (DWI) stringent quality standards.

We have performed strongly against the target and industry average in the DWI’s Compliance Risk Index performance measure. This considers water quality compliance failures at water treatment works, service reservoirs and in domestic household water plumbing, (cause, location and customer impact).

The Event Risk Index, based on the number and seriousness of events, how they are managed and their impact, is currently above our target, mainly due to the extent and duration of extreme weather events throughout the year (summer incident, flooding and freeze/thaw) but we continue to perform better than the industry average.

In October we engaged with our supply chain to host an ideas sprint session as part of our ambitious leakage recovery plan work in the wake of the exceptional weather events. This well-supported event brought around 20 of our suppliers together and concluded that our leakage strategy remained sound. As a result of the event, more work is being done via our overarching IT strategy to make sure all our data and systems are closely aligned to further improve our effectiveness, while further increasing our data points in the field to help us detect leaks and identify supply network issues. We have an ambitious recovery in place to March 2025.

We have continued to invest and innovate using the latest satellite technology to help us find and fix leaks on our vast network of underground pipes. In the past year we have surveyed 15 per cent of our network in this way.

Repairs to our drinking water storage tanks in mid-Kent are continuing following sinkhole damage in 2020.

Repairs to our drinking water storage tanks in mid-Kent are continuing following sinkhole damage in 2020.

One reservoir cell has been back in operation for more than a year; one has been safely demolished; and the third, and largest, cell is being extensively repaired to strengthen the structure. When complete in 2023, the site will provide 14.6 million litres of drinking water storage.

The treatment process at Woodgarston is now benefitting from new £5.5 million nitrate removal equipment installed at the treatment works to future-proof the water supply from forecasted nitrate level increases in the area.

We have completed the programme of disinfection upgrades across 10 sites, including installation of new UV disinfection plants across our network to make our disinfection process more resilient, whilst a major upgrade at Barcombe Water Treatment Works is progressing well.

An extensive calm network survey has been carried out in more than 100 locations across our network as part of an ongoing programme. A calm network, with smooth and stable management of pressure levels, is a key part of our leakage strategy as it reduces the number of bursts on the network and reduces the rate of growth of existing hard-to-find leaks. Through intelligent pressure monitoring, reducing pressure variations across our network and reviewing our valve controls and pumping technologies, we can identify areas with high pressure variations and reduce interruptions to supply. This benefits customers and enables us to make further leakage reductions that would not be possible through the more traditional ‘find and fix’ approach.

We have continued to work closely with organisations able to offer support in the event of major water supply incidents. During the extreme weather incidents, this involved liaising with local resilience forums, particularly in Kent and Sussex, about alternative supplies to key infrastructure sites (e.g., hospitals) and to vulnerable customers. We are now looking at what we can do to strengthen these partnerships to further improve our planning and response in preparation for future events.

Our teams have been extraordinarily agile during the exceptional weather events of the past year, adapting well to prioritise their workloads and support other areas during incidents. There was a sterling effort by colleagues to resolve issues and offer support to customers in the run-up to Christmas, including Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

The freeze thaw in December impacted four per cent of our customers, mainly in Sussex and the Tunbridge Wells area of Kent.

We provided a lot of support to customers experiencing leaks and bursts in their own properties, in addition to those we found and fixed on our own network, and we have implemented a new process to help customers to fix leaks on their own properties.

A number of engineering projects have been accelerated as a result of the extreme weather issues and some additional longer term resilience schemes have been added into the Price Review 24 process.