Despite everything we’ve had to navigate this year, we’ve continued to provide high-quality water throughout and I’m delighted to see that early results show we’re one of the top ranked companies in terms of water quality.”
Dave Shemanns
Chair
Watch a message from our CEO
Your water,
our promise
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What's in this report
About us
Who we are
We are a local water supplier providing an essential public service while playing an active role in the communities we are privileged to serve.
What we do
We supply around 160 million litres of clean water every day to more than 750,000 people in parts of Surrey, Kent, West Sussex and South London.
Our purpose
Harnessing the potential of water to enhance nature and improve lives.
Our business in numbers
345
Number of employees
72%
Customers with a water meter
100%
Percentage of our pipe network that is ‘smart’
8
Water treatment works
Q&A with our Chair
Chief Executive Officer’s statement
We have continued to provide financial support for customers through our ‘Here For You’ programme and have focused on ensuring that support reaches those who need it the most.”
Ian Cain
Chief Executive Officer
Our pledges
We’ll provide you with high-quality water all day, every day
Nothing is more important to us than keeping our customers supplied with safe, clean water.
Highlights
- For 2022/23, we reported a water quality risk index score of 0.01, which places us as one of the top-ranking companies for water quality in the Drinking Water Inspectorate’s 2023 report.
- We’ve maintained our excellent performance for minimising the number of customers contacting us about the taste, smell or appearance of their water and continue to be significantly better than industry average.
Water quality
DWI Compliance Risk Index (CRI) score
Mains repairs
number/1,000 kilometres
Water softening
number of periods exceeding hardness target (mg/l)
Supply interruptions
hours:minutes:seconds/property/year
Taste, odour and discolouration contacts
number per 1,000 customers
Water quality
DWI Compliance Risk Index (CRI) score
Mains repairs
number/1,000 kilometres
Water softening
number of periods exceeding hardness target (mg/l)
We’ll provide your service at a fair price and offer help when you need it
This year we have been able to support our customers to pay their bill and provided financial support options when they have needed it the most.
Highlights
- Our average household bill for 2022/23 equated to around 60 pence a day.
- We know our customers are being impacted by the rise in cost of living and have continued to provide financial support to them through our ‘Here For You’ payment support schemes.
- We also regularly visit vulnerable customers to make sure the members of the community who need it most benefit from our support. This includes contact over telephone and attending food banks.
- 19,476 customers are benefitting from our Water Support Scheme, which provides a 50% bill reduction to eligible people. This means we are surpassing the target we set ourselves for year four of this five-year Business Plan period.
- 7% of our customers are on our Priority Services Register, which provides extra support to those who have health, access or communication needs.
- More than 80% of our customers think the extra services we offer are helpful.
- We reduced the volume of connected properties with no billing account to just 2.4% on average across the year, meaning more customers are paying for the water they are using.
Supporting customers in financial hardship
number
Customers on our Priority Services Register
%
Vulnerable support scheme helpfulness
%
Void properties
%
Vulnerable support scheme awareness
%
Proportion of customers who believe their bill is not good value
% dissatisfied
Supporting customers in financial hardship
number
Customers on our Priority Services Register
%
Vulnerable support scheme helpfulness
%
We’ll provide you with a service that is fit now and for the future
We target our investment in our infrastructure every year where it is needed most and are using innovative technology to provide a better service to our customers.
Highlights
- We have stayed at or below the maximum allowed level of leakage every year since the target was first set more than 20 years ago and have once again met our leakage reduction target, which is industry leading.
- We have won a Utility Week Award for Innovation, recognising our investment in our ‘smart’ network technology to detect and fix leaks quicker.
- We also won the Asset Management Initiative of the Year Award and were shortlisted for Water Company of the Year at the Water Industry Awards in June.
- We have laid 13 kilometres of new main pipe in the past year and progressed a number of key mains replacement schemes across our supply area. As a result, we are on track to meet our target for the number of mains repairs in the remaining year of the AMP.
- Key mains replacement schemes have been completed this year across Edenbridge, Brockham and Redhill. We’ve also completed a new main from Langley Park to How Green. This means we’re nearing completion of a 15-year resilience programme we’ve been progressing since 2010. By 2025, every property across our region will be supplied by more than one treatment works if, due to operational challenges, this is needed.
Leakage reduction
MI/day
Risk of severe restrictions in a drought
% customers
Unplanned outages at treatment works
%
Risk of supply failures
% of properties connected to more than one treatment works
Leakage reduction
MI/day
Risk of severe restrictions in a drought
% customers
Unplanned outages at treatment works
%
We’ll provide excellent service, whenever and however you need it
We want the most satisfied customers in the country and to get there we are fundamentally changing a lot of what we do and significantly investing in our people and the systems they use.
Highlights
- We achieved our highest ever C-MeX ranking of 10th for the period January to March 2023. For the full year, we finished 13th, which is two places up from last year.
- We have launched MyAccount, an online platform accessed via our website, so customers can more easily pay their bills, manage Direct Debits, see how much water they’re using and more. Since launch, there have been more than 56,000 registrations to the platform.
- We have recently improved our dedicated service for bereaved customers, provided our field teams with braille passes and offered Dementia Friends training to our whole workforce.
- We’ve increased the number of employees in our Customer Care team and now answer over 95% of calls within 30 seconds.
- We’ve re-designed our complaints journey and introduced new Root Cause Analysis reporting that is enabling us to target and remove the drivers of customer dissatisfaction.
- We’ve developed a new Customer Academy to give our employees all the development and support they need to deliver excellent service to our customers.
C-MeX (industry measure of customer satisfaction)
score
First contact resolution
%
D-MeX (industry measure of developer satisfaction)
score
C-MeX (industry measure of customer satisfaction)
score
First contact resolution
%
D-MeX (industry measure of developer satisfaction)
score
We’ll support a thriving environment we can all rely on
We are committed to reducing the impact of our operations by achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2030 and continuing to implement more sustainable ways of pumping, treating and distributing millions of litres of water every single day.
Highlights
- We retained the Wildlife Trusts’ Biodiversity Benchmark Award for the third year at our Elmer Treatment Works and the second year at Fetcham Springs in Leatherhead. We are the only water company to currently hold the accreditation and expect one more site to follow by 2025.
- More than two thirds of our customers are already metered and we are looking to provide meters for 90% of our customers by March 2025.
- We launched our draft Water Resources Management Plan for consultation, which looks ahead 50 years and helps us understand how much water will be available and how much we will need to supply.
- Our vehicle fleet now comprises 30% electric vehicles, with each electric car helping to save 2-3 tonnes of CO₂e per year, as well as reducing the impact on local air quality.
- We have partnered with Run Series to support both Run Gatwick and Run Reigate as the events’ official water provider, avoiding more than 48,000 single-use plastic water bottles from being given out at each event.
- We’ve continued our work with Bore Place, a charity local to our Bough Beech site, and a number of other partners to assess opportunity to develop biodiversity net gain on a landscape scale.
Consumption
litres consumed per person per day
Greenhouse gas emissions
kgCO₂e/megalitre
Abstraction Incentive Mechanism
average megalitres reduction
River-based improvement – delivery of Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP)
number of schemes
Pollution incidents
number of category 1 and 2 incidents
Land-based improvement – biodiversity
number of sites awarded benchmark
Consumption
litres consumed per person per day
Greenhouse gas emissions
kgCO₂e/megalitre
Abstraction Incentive Mechanism
average megalitres reduction
Sustainability
The last 12 months have, once again, demonstrated the absolute importance of our ongoing and increasing focus on our environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda: the impact our operations have on the environment, and how we mitigate this; the post-COVID cost of living crisis fuelled by geopolitical events, and how we best protect customers from its effects; the importance of preparing for possible future scenarios, and providing transparency and line-of-sight on those impacting us today to key stakeholders.
In a year that saw more UK weather records broken, triggering a nation-wide drought, the storm overflow scandal engulfing our employees elsewhere in the sector and annual inflation reaching levels not seen since the 1970s, the challenges that we and the sector must rise to have never been more apparent.
Where we operate
Our supply area is 322 square miles extending from Morden and South Croydon in the North to Gatwick Airport in the South and from Cobham, Leatherhead and Dorking in the West to Edenbridge in the East.
