Mother And Daughter Pouring Water (4)

  • Our purpose is to provide water for life. We are committed to making a positive impact for the good of our customers and communities.

    We provide essential services to 2.6 million water customers and 4.7 million wastewater customers across Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

  • How we are delivering our purpose

    We are providing water for life

    Enhancing health and wellbeing

    Supporting our customers, employees and communities in the South East

    It is our priority to ensure everyone has access to clean, safe and affordable water and effective and efficient wastewater services. We also want to ensure that our employees reflect the diverse communities we serve and that we are always improving.

    Kids Drinking water

    Kids Drinking water

    Protecting and improving the environment

    Ensuring a sustainable and resilient water future

    It is our responsibility to help protect the water environment for future generations. This means not only looking after the environment but finding ways to leave it in a better state than we found it using nature-based solutions where possible, adapting to climate change and ensuring we manage our operations in a sustainable way.

    Lake

    Lake

    Sustaining
    the economy

    Promoting innovation and a holistic approach to planning

    We take an integrated, systems-thinking approach to creating long-term value for our customers and key stakeholders. Our decisions are shaped by their material issues, risk and value assessments and an underlying commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters.

    Treatment systems employee

    Treatment systems employee

  • Our progress

    Our journey of delivering better outcomes for our customers and becoming a more resilient organisation.

    Resilience is at the centre of our strategy to become brilliant at the basics while transforming key areas of our business. We believe there is a substantial opportunity to adopt a more integrated approach to the way that we deliver our services over the 2020–25 period; using systems thinking to look at the bigger picture, and how we might collaborate with our peers and other industries to deliver joint solutions to some of our bigger challenges.

    Download PDF

    Drain repair

  • Overview

    Chairman's statement

    Keith Lough

    Keith Lough

    We have maintained the financial
    stability of the company, ensuring
    at the same time that we have
    the appropriate financing in place
    to deliver on our Business Plan
    2020–25

    Keith Lough

    Chairman

    Download PDF

    Chief Executive's summary

    Ian MacAulay

    Ian MacAulay

    Our culture is underpinned
    by our values of succeeding
    together, doing the right thing
    and always improving

    Ian MacAulay

    Chief Executive Officer

    Download PDF

  • Value delivered to key stakeholders

    Communities

    Overview

    • We contributed to a combined donation, with other water companies and UK Power Networks, of £500,000 to regional Community Foundations. In addition, 700 care packs were sent out via our foodbank partners and we provided remote volunteering support through our ‘befriender’ caller network.
    • We offered virtual job interviews and mentoring opportunities to secondary school pupils and hosted the ‘Big Virtual Water Quiz’ with National Geographic Kids and four other water companies.

     

    Future plans

    • Our refreshed community funding scheme will offer grants to our regional charities as well as local non-registered charities, e.g. community groups/’Friends of’ groups. We will also look to support our communities with access to training, storage and meeting room space.
    • Our new community steering group – including employees and customers – will ensure we foster connections with our communities so we can better support and understand their individual needs.

    Employees

    Overview

    • During the year, as a result of the impact of COVID-19, we changed a number of our policies to support our employees and their families, offering extended dependency leave and enabling remote working where possible.
    • The Learning Zone was launched in early 2020–21 for all employees, offering online access to mandatory and people skills training via a series of short courses. Since its launch, the number of our employees undertaking training has increased by 5%.
    • A new Southern Water STARS platform offers colleagues the opportunity to send each other messages of thanks, and managers the opportunity to reward exceptional employees with small monetary awards. More than 3,000 STARS have been awarded since the platform went live in April 2020.

     

    Future plans

    • We will be taking on up to 23 apprentices in different functions such as wastewater, water and engineering and construction, as well as rolling out new internal apprentice programmes in leadership, management and project management with space for up to 34 colleagues in the year to March 2022.
    • We have partnered with the Chichester College Group to offer a range of business skills training, such as project management, lean management, business writing and change management.

    Environment

    Overview

    • During 2020–21, we have refocused our baseline operations to further reduce pollution incidents and increase compliance through investment in capital maintenance, digitisation and incident response. We also published our Pollution Incident Reduction Plan.
    • Our Catchment First programme is investigating potential pollutants that could compromise the sustainability of our drinking water supplies, and is working in partnership with farmers and landowners to manage those risks. The programme is also investigating the impact of the removal of water from the local environment and the use of more sustainable methods, be that from rivers/streams, Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Special Areas of Conservation (SAC) or wetlands.
    • We are working with partners across the South East to improve bathing waters as part of our Bathing Water Enhancement Programme and have launched our updated Beachbuoy service, offering watersports enthusiasts access to real-time data about our Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) discharges.

     

    Future priorities

    • We are already industry leading in terms of driving down personal daily water usage through our metering and Target 100 water efficiency programmes. We will demonstrate further how we can focus and lead on this issue, which is vital in the water-stressed South East.
    • We will create a cross-sector plan to protect the globally important chalk rivers of Hampshire.
    • Over the next four years, we will invest £5 million on targeted environmental projects that will deliver additional benefits such as increased carbon storage, improved water quality, reduced flood risk and increased health and wellbeing. These projects will be run in partnership with recognised bodies such as the Wildlife Trusts and the Rivers Trusts.
    • We will publish our Net Zero Plan by July 2021 and our updated Climate Change Adaptation Plan by December 2021.
    • We are purchasing 100% green energy as part of our Net Zero Plan – delivering on our Water UK-agreed Public Interest Commitment.

  • Operational

    Thumbs up icon

    Deliver great service

    Our performance in 2020–21

    • We forecast that our water compliance risk index (CRI) score will be 4.53 (2020: 7.7). Although this is a further year-on-year improvement, we expect it will still be worse than the industry average once results are published by the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI). 78% of the 2020 score was due to failures at works (eight coliforms and one turbidity). We are continuing to deliver against our established compliance improvement plan, agreed with the DWI.
    • We have reported 4,409 external flooding incidents during the year (2019–20: 5,968), which represents an improvement on last year, and falls within our regulator’s target of 4,412. Fluctuations in the weather always put pressure on our network, however, we are confident that our performance demonstrates our improved resilience.

     

    Future plans

    • Water supply interruption – continue to reduce the average time customers are without water, with a reduction of 23% by 2025.
    • Internal and external sewer flooding – a 20% reduction in the number of internal and external sewer flooding incidents affecting customers' homes and outside areas by 2025.
    Water drop icon

    Use water wisely

    Our performance in 2020–21

    • Although we had to stop all water-saving home visits during the national lockdowns this year, we have still carried out more than 1,000, installing water-saving products for those customers using more water than average, saving a total of 105 cubic metres per day. We have also continued to supply customers with water-saving advice through our digital, social media and radio awareness campaigns.
    • Our leakage performance for 2020–21 was 98.5 Ml/d (2020: 94 Ml/d), which means we did not meet our target. We expect an improvement in our leakage performance as we deliver our advanced pressure management roll-out over the coming year.
    • Changes in water usage as a result of COVID-19 have increased customers’ individual daily water consumption by around 7% to 137.6 litres per person, per day (2019–20: 126.5 litres).

     

    Future plans

    • Individual daily water consumption – reduce personal water use to 118.8 litres per person, per day by 2025.
    • Leakage – reduce leakage to 84.9 megalitres per day (Ml/d) by 2025.
    Environment icon

    Protect and improve the environment

    Our performance in 2020–21

    • We are pleased to report that once again 100% of the bio-solids from our wastewater treatment process were recycled in 2020– 21, with none going to landfill.
    • Our total number of reportable pollution incidents for the year was 400, which was higher than our target of 98 due to an extended period of wet weather in February. As a result, we received the maximum penalty of £7.7 million. We forecast that we will remain in the penalty space for the remainder of this five-year period while we continue to drive improvements through our Pollution Incident Reduction Plan.
    • Our Wastewater Treatment Compliance deteriorated in 2020, with 10 failed works. A new Compliance Process Assessment and Control process for taking plant in and out of service, and extreme weather plans have been introduced. In addition, our new ‘Go-to-Green’ management process is reducing the number of sites at risk.
    • A number of our projects in our National Environment Programme did not achieve completion by their regulatory dates due to a combination of planning, design or construction challenges. We recognise this is an area to improve and remains a key focus.

     

    Future plans

    • Pollution incidents – reduce annual incidents to less than 80 by 2025, aiming for zero by 2040.
    • Treatment works compliance – maintain and improve our wastewater treatment works, aiming for 100% compliance by 2025.
    • Deliver environmental benefit by embedding a natural capital approach, investing in initiatives delivering environmental net gain and nature-based solutions. One project already identified is focusing on Chichester and Langstone Harbours.
    • Deliver the Water Industry National Environment Programme – 739 investigations and schemes to 2025.
    Fit for future icon

    Fit for the future

    Our performance in 2020–21

    • We have undertaken extensive work to better understand and improve the resilience of our water asset health. As a result, we have more than halved unplanned outage to 9.21%, from 18.59% in 2019–20 and below our regulatory target of 9.45%. Unplanned outages occur when emergency works at our treatment plants cause us to lose water in the system.
    • Sewer collapses were reduced in 2020–21 to 7.2 (2020: 7.8) per 1,000km of sewers. This is above Ofwat’s target but is an improvement on last year’s performance.

     

    Future plans

    • Long-term supply and demand schemes – ensure future customers have access to sufficient water supplies by making progress toward delivering an additional 182.5 Ml/d of new water resource capacity.
    • Risk of severe restrictions in a drought – maintain our performance of no customers being at risk of severe water restrictions in a drought.

  • Financial

    Revenue1 (before regulatory settlement)

    £m

    £784.2m

    Profit before interest and tax1

    £m

    £139.6m

    Net Debt2

    £m

    (£5,150.6m)

    Capital investment2

    £m

    £554.8m

    Non-current assets (excluding debt)

    £m

    £6,663.9m

    Return on capital employed (ROCE)3

    %

    2.2%

    Regulatory Capital Value (RCV)4

    £m

    £5,111m

    Net debt/RCV5

    %

    70%

    Average water and wastewater customer bill

    £

    £391

  • Explore our report

    Our external environment

    Download PDF

    Our business model

    Download PDF

    Sustainability

    Download PDF

    Risks

    Download PDF

    Corporate governance report

    Download PDF

    Directors' remuneration report

    Download PDF

  • Downloads