Bristol Water Performance in 2021/22

During 2021/2022, investment and resource was used to deliver the maintenance of our assets. This delivery has prevented deterioration of habitat conditions and ensured natural assets continue to provide multiple ecosystem services such as biodiversity, recreation, and water quality value. We delivered a range of natural asset interventions including the installation of a new woodland asset at Axbridge treatment works near Cheddar Reservoir and the felling of and removal from site of diseased ash trees to prevent asset deterioration.

Our annual activities to maintain asset condition includes hay cuts, amending grass cutting schedules and routine treatment of invasive plant species. These actions mitigate negative changes in the biodiversity value.

We also consult with Natural England when planning enhancement works to its designated sites to determine whether proposals would meet net-gain delivery and qualify for biodiversity Index points accomplished. We also discussed this through an Environment sub-group of the Bristol Water Challenge Panel.

Whilst previously we have focused on fixing bursts as quickly as possible, we have changed our approach to focus first on maintaining service to our customers wherever possible. This has led to the development of ‘Continuous Water Supply’ techniques such as live clamp repairs, and a ‘Safe Control of Operations’ framework, which focuses on minimising stresses on the network wherever possible.

The above approach and the minimal impact of a mild winter mean that we have outperformed the challenging target set for the year. This is the lowest number of mains repairs reported for the last 10 years.

There were 25 compliance failures in 2021, one fewer than in 2020. These compliance failures reflected one-off coliform failures from samples taken at larger treatment works, that have a high weighting on this index. Our investigations conclude that only two sample failures were evaluated as being preventable (in the case of Cheddar works and Banwell) which relate to sample lines/taps. To address this the company has undertaken surveys of all final water sample points and are considering the replacement and moving of these sites where deficiencies are found.

Customer contacts for discoloured water remain the biggest contributor to appearance contacts (at 70% of all contacts). This discolouration can be primarily attributed to the disturbance of harmless iron sediments within the mains network.

Our performance is due to the disparate and isolated causes of discolouration, which is not linked to current source or treatment works activities. Moving forward, we have employed several approaches to reduce the risk of discolouration, including:

• Recruiting a new Customer & Network Scientist as a dedicated resource to investigate the underlying causes of discolouration and identify the relevant intervention required to reduce the risk of it recurring;
• Providing awareness and training to external stakeholders such as the local fire service on how to use hydrants in our area without giving rise to discolouration;
• Producing an educational video for anyone wanting to hire a standpipe from the Company to demonstrate the correct way to operate a hydrant; and
• Creating a focused steering group, including members of senior management and key stakeholders, to establish a strategy and action plan for achieving our targets in subsequent years.

We also aim to continuously review and improve the information available to customers on our website regarding some of the other issues that develop within the home relative to this performance commitment.

We are pleased to have again outperformed our target for this year, demonstrating the Company’s continuing commitment to ensure the aesthetic quality of the water for our customers.

As a large proportion of taste and odour contacts are associated with the internal plumbing system in customers’ homes, we have continued to make improvements to the information on our website to aid our customers to resolve this problem as quickly as possible.

C-MeX is split into a customer service survey and a perception survey. Our service survey rank was 4th, an increase from 5th last year, whereas our perception score has improved to 7th, an increase from 10th in the previous year.

Our ‘In their shoes’ campaign has become embedded within the culture of our customer facing operational teams. As part of the campaign the teams are consistently speaking with every customer after each visit to check the wider satisfaction of the customer. We have seen our customer feedback double in the last 12 months, whilst at the same time our operational customer complaints have reduced by c.75%, reflecting the benefits of the campaign and our focus on responding to customer feedback.

Looking ahead, we have five projects in place aimed at improving our C-MeX score. These focus on areas of importance to the customer such as affordable bills, reducing water usage and improvements to our network. Over the next 12 months we will also be communicating more widely with our customers via our external communication channels and there will be a step change in telling the stories of the work we and our delivery partners do in the community.

We have improved our score with better customer satisfaction scores in the survey and with closer management of target dates we will deliver on the priorities of our customers who ask for better communication and timescales for completed work.

We continue to invite our customers to Market Engagement Events, this year we held two virtual events, in November and March. We invited our customers to discuss on topics including the Charges Scheme, Adoption Codes, Fixed Price quoting and infrastructure reduction for water efficient new builds. We also send regular Newsletters by email to keep our customers who cannot attend the events informed.

Due to the integrated nature of our water sources, we operate a single water resource zone. A water resource zone is the largest possible area in which all resources can be shared. We use the water resource zone for operational management, water resource planning and drought management. The sensitivity of the Bristol Water supply demand balance, and the fact we only have one water resource zone, significantly impacts this metric, which is why our performance is not directly applicable to other companies (many of whom have multiple water resources zones).

Our preferred approach to maintaining our supply-demand balance continues to be focused on optimising the use of our existing water sources while continuing to drive down leakage and water consumption to maintain sustainable use of water resources. Moreover, if we continue to outperform our leakage targets, as we have for 2020/21 and 2021/22, the risk to our customers of introducing severe restrictions in a drought will continue to reduce.

We are pleased to have outperformed our target for this year; a lower number in this indicator identifies reduced asset downtime and increased reliability.

We aim to provide the right maintenance and whole life care to our assets to ensure that they are reliable and efficient. This is achieved by assessing all our assets to better understand which have the greater impact on our ability to meet our customer requirements. By providing the right level of care and investment in our assets we are able to provide a resilient supply of quality water with minimal interruptions.

One aspect of performance where we continue to lead the industry is in leakage reduction. We are consistently reporting the lowest leakage levels in the industry. In 2020/21 we achieved the lowest level of leakage to date. As we were ahead of our reduction target in previous years, we have remained ahead of the three year average target, with the Water UK Leakage Routemap noting that Bristol Water was the only company to already meet the industry’s 2030 commitment for lower leakage levels.

Our leakage performance can be attributed to significant effort to reduce leakage on our distribution network with more leakage inspectors deployed, supported with additional technology, whilst working closely with our customers (to provide advice, support and assistance) to minimise leakage. Proactive and reactive pressure reduction activities have also assisted in optimising and calming the network, as well as contributing to reductions in leakage. We aim to continue to deliver on our industry-leading levels of service through a combination of focused leakage detection and repair activity, enhanced network monitoring through the introduction of “smart networks” and additional pressure management to reduce network volatility and stabilise the pressure received by our customers.

In addition, we also offer customers help with our Bristol Water Leakstop scheme. As part of the scheme, we offer help for leaks on underground supply pipes. We offer:

• A free leak assistance service; and
• A £100 subsidy payment if a customer repairs the leak or replaces the leaky pipe within 21 days (this is capped to one payment per leaky pipe).

Whilst metering is generally regarded as being the fairest and most accurate way to pay for water, our customers have consistently told us through consultations and surveys that they do not wish to see full compulsory metering for all our domestic customers. Thus, we are not able to achieve our meter penetration target via compulsion, and are reliant upon customer demand, meter installations upon change of ownership and effective, persuasive marketing.

Following our ‘Life’s sweeter with a meter’ marketing, we have continued our ‘Peter the Meter’ campaign, continuing to encourage customers to take up the benefits of a meter. We have combined this with radio advertisements and letter drops. Since our relaunch of the campaign in June, there has been a positive increase on optant applications.

Our focus has been on managing and developing our communication and marketing plan. This has seen improvement of the application uptake through all media channels and allowed customers to apply at first opportunity including online and over the phone. To assist with improving confidence, we have introduced incentives to allow customers to make the most informed choice around retaining their Meter Option, whereby customers can explore the benefits of a meter without the risk of paying any more than their existing bill.

Our stakeholders’ high satisfaction for this year is based on the positive contribution to the communities that we serve, which our social contract programmes and initiatives aim to achieve. In order to demonstrate to our stakeholders that we have improved our contributions to our local communities, we are undertaking a range of social contract programmes, with specified objectives for the year.

Our Mid-Year Social Contract Benefit and Transparency Report, published in December 2021, previously set out our progress to date. Some of the highlights from this year include:

• Resource West - We are taking a community leadership role for broader issues of resource efficiency and have created partnerships with the University of the West of England, Wales and West Utilities, Western Power Distribution and Bristol Pay CIC;
• Education and awareness of water issues through our youth board - We host an annual Youth Board programme which brings the views of young people into our decision making, as well as providing development opportunities and business experience for the young people involved;
• Supporting vulnerable customers - In response to the pandemic, we increased our focus on providing a service to all those vulnerable customers who need our support the most;
• Working with our communities and stakeholders - We have continued to play an active role in the Bristol One City Plan through our role in the Environmental Sustainability Board and by working with Bristol Green Capital Partnership to link our own strategies to those of the city;
• Academic partnerships - we have provided learning experiences to university students through work-based placements;
• Together for Good - This is a monthly competition which provides £500 to a charity or community scheme. Some examples of charities and community groups which we supported are Brigstowe (who deliver local HIV support services), Migrateful (who help refugees and asylum seekers on their journey to independence) and Grief Encounter (who support those suffering from grief); and
• Improve community experiences and opportunities at our lakes and reservoirs – The Chew Valley Recreational Trail was opened in May 2022.

This year we have made a determined effort to minimise the properties at risk of receiving low pressure and commissioned several targeted interventions to improve our customers’ experience. These have included:

• new mains;
• network configuration changes; and
• enhancing common private supply pipe arrangements.

Despite having been made aware of an additional 23 properties being at risk of receiving low pressure (in addition to the existing 57 properties on the Low Pressure Register on 31 March 2021), we have been able to remove 69 properties from our Low Pressure Register and end the year outperforming our targeted performance by a significant margin. Improved network modelling and logging has accelerated our ability to identify and evidence the solution to customers who may receive persistent low pressure.

Reliability of water supply is a top priority for our customers. The Glastonbury and Street zones are supplied from Cheddar treatment works via a considerable length of “Critical Main” for which there is no redundancy. This project will ensure that a population of approximately 28,000 have resilience of supply by providing an additional route of supply to Windmill Hill Reservoir, maintaining the supply of water to Glastonbury and Street in the event that the main supply route is lost or compromised. It also ensures that those customers in Glastonbury and Street would be at a significantly less risk of experiencing water supply interruptions of over 24 hours.

We are on track to deliver the scheme by March 2023 (ahead of the deadline of 31 March 2025).

We believe that increased household consumption due to the rise in homeworking and school closures, coupled with a decrease in household income has significantly contributed to this increase in water poverty

We offer three discounted tariffs to make sure we can help customers who find it hard to pay their water charges, with 21,209 customers receiving assistance through these measures, an increase of 3.9% over last year. The breakdown are as follows:

• 9,313 households are on our ‘Assist’ social tariff, which offers significant bill discounts to those customers least able to afford their bill, following a means assessment;
• 8,670 households are on our ‘Watersure Plus’ metered tariff, this is for customers in receipt of certain benefits, and are defined as ‘vulnerable’, either because they have a medical condition or a large family; and
• 3,226 customers are on our ‘Pension Credit Discount’ social tariff. This scheme gives a 20% discount on water bills to customers who live in a household where all members over the age of 18 are in receipt of Pension Credit.

Our Covid Assist scheme, introduced in October 2021, was designed to help and support those struggling to pay due to changes in circumstances caused by Covid-19 (particularly for customers who were affected by the COVID-19 furlough scheme drawing to an end). This scheme is a special low-rate tariff, which gives six months of financial relief.

In addition to the social tariff schemes, 3,918 households are currently benefitting from our ‘Restart’ scheme, which helps customers to clear their debt. We also offer metering, water efficiency support and flexible payment plans to customers.

Using our water poverty tool we will further target our social tariff support to those in water poverty.

One of our biggest challenges we face is customer perception and their understanding of the value of water, and in how we work with customers and other stakeholders to educate them on demand management and the benefits of water efficiency. Our future water availability and keeping water in the environment relies heavily on customers, consumers and communities really understanding the value of water and by working with us to make sure we have a better, more resilient future. Unfortunately, our performance, has been severely impacted by COVID-19, with a shift from non-household to household consumption through working at home and increased water use for hand washing.

This measure is an indication of our progress made against our published Vulnerability Action Plan.

We expect our performance on this measure to increase in the coming years as we continue to improve the service we offer as part of the PSR. Over the next year this will include projects such as:

• Our Social Contract Vulnerability Programme;
• Company-wide vulnerability training;
• Increased use of our new “Vulnerability Heroes” network of colleagues;
• The use of case studies of customers on our PSR to better understand our customers;
• Letters being sent to individuals once they have been signed up to the PSR, including a reminder of the service they have signed up for;
• A cleanse of data on the PSR to ensure that customers on the PSR should be, and that they are aware of why they are signed up; and
• Our planned online registration journey improvements.

We have registered an additional 7,760 households on the PSR in 2021/22, taking the number registered from 13,407 to 21,167.

We provide a range of free services to support customers in vulnerable circumstances, such as large print bills, support to read a meter, or ensuring consistent supply for those who depend on water for medical equipment at home. Other initiatives include:

• Our local data share with Weston Power Distribution;
• Training and support for staff through our Vulnerability Heroes;
• Digital PSR outreach events;
• Distributing PSR information leaflets at certain foodbanks; and
• Creating branded pharmacy bags for awareness;
• Redesign of our bill to focus on messages around PSR and the support we can offer.

We are also working on other data sharing arrangements with local authorities, which will benefit our future PSR delivery.

Our outperformance for this year has been achieved by providing advice to farms and supporting farms to improve their infrastructure where this will reduce pollution risk. We have delivered the following support and interventions:

• Nutrient management plans and associated soil and manure analysis and spreading risk maps on 15 farms
• A constructed wetland on one farm
• Watercourse fencing on two farms
• Yard improvements (roofing/concreting) on three farms
• New slurry stores on two farms
• New dirty water store on one farm
• Slurry / solids separator on one farm
• Advice and support around nutrient and soil management to many farms across the catchments.

Those listed above were paid out by Bristol Water during 2020/21 or 2021/22. We only claim for the benefit of nutrient management plans delivered in 2020/21 if we have sat down with the farmer and reviewed them in 2021/22, because by doing so we encourage continued uptake of the plan. There are additional schemes which are either under way or in development.

Our catchment management efforts contribute to our aim to maintain raw water quality in our sources, so that the water is easier and less expensive to treat to a potable standard. This work also helps to maintain our SSSIs in favourable conservation status and surrounding waterbodies in good ecological status or potential under the Water Framework Directive which benefits the local communities by improving the environment and enhancing natural capital.

Our performance (which we believe to be our best ever performance to date) has significantly improved compared to last year. We have achieved a 92% improvement in our performance this year. This can be attributed to a number of changes implemented over the past three years, including:

• Investing heavily in our smart network and increasing the coverage of pressure loggers to allow us to proactively recognise when incidents may be about to occur;
• Developing mapping tools to include pressure and flow information;
• Developing quick response ‘grab-packs’ for high-risk sections of the network;
• Implementing continuous water supply techniques including on-demand bowsers, infusion tankering, rezoning and over-land connections;
• Creating additional roles, including incident managers, to support these changes and provide 24 hour monitoring and support to our operational and maintenance teams; and
• Investing in the replacement of old mains pipes to ensure that the risk of incidents is reduced.

This year, our proactive planning enabled us to maintain supplies to customers during three major storms that hit in February. The storms had led to the biggest power supply outage levels recorded in our area. We maintained supplies with the use of mobile generators, infusion tankering and the huge dedication of our operational teams.

Our end of year figure of complaints is 30.3, circa 50% below our target.

At Bristol Water we aim to provide the best possible service at all times. For all complaints we consider what action to take to put things right. Complaint resolution and handling is a key focus of our customer experience strategy, every complaint is handled by our Customer Care Team where a designated member of staff ensures that the complaint is resolved. The team provide root cause information which feeds into our learnings and future improvements to prevent repeat complaints.

We have a long track record of achieving zero turbidity events and by continuing to monitor turbidity we are confident that this will continue into futures years.

The risk to our customers arising from a higher level of void properties is that these properties are at risk of being unknowingly occupied to us and therefore debt could be building. It is very important that we keep a close management on the void level to prevent this happening. It is therefore encouraging that our level of performance this year has seen a considerable reduction from our baseline position on 31 March 2020.

The first six months of the year saw a continued high amount of house moves (partly due to the temporarily reduced stamp duty rates). We have worked to use our data and resources to identify and reduce the voids below the target.

Our outage record continues to remain below our target levels which indicates a high level of service. We respond immediately to all unplanned outage failures - unless there is a reason why the outage cannot be fixed that is outside of our control. All outages are addressed before they exceed the 24 hour duration criteria.

Value for money is an important concept in measuring whether customers consider that the service that we provide is worth what they pay for it. Some customers however struggle to make this assessment, often citing that they cannot compare the ‘value’ because they cannot choose their water supplier and will instead base their judgement not on the bill value, but on other perceptions. Whilst our average customer bills are similar to the national average customer bills, the survey is conducted in January and February, when increases in bills were being announced. This was also following the withdrawal of national government financial support, even though we introduced our COVID-Assist scheme for those impacted by the furlough scheme coming to an end in October 2021. The results show that there is room for improvement in the services we provide to our customers.

Work to deliver on our WINEP obligations and projects has progressed well through Years 1 and 2. We have completed and had signed off by the EA (and Natural England for certain investigations) 26 projects, which was the stated target at this stage.

For this year, the projects we have completed include abstraction sustainability investigations at six sites, catchment water quality investigations at Barrow treatment works and at Forum Springs treatment works, and 18 invasive species and biosecurity investigations.

Work to deliver on our WINEP obligations and projects has progressed well through Years 1 and 2. We have completed and had signed off by the EA (and Natural England for certain investigations) 26 projects, which was the stated target at this stage.

For this year, the projects we have completed include abstraction sustainability investigations at six sites, catchment water quality investigations at Barrow treatment works and at Forum Springs treatment works, and 18 invasive species and biosecurity investigations.

Although we have not met our 100% compliance target for this year, we did achieve full compliance in January, February, June, July, August, September and October. There have been six non-compliant samples, from of a total of 352 samples collected -98% of the samples collected overall were fully compliant with the discharge consent conditions, which is consistent with our performance over the last four years. We are constantly reviewing the reasons for the small number of failures that are preventing our ability to achieve full compliance, with a view to implementing remedial measures to drive our compliance higher.

Our ability to report higher compliance for this performance commitment has continued to be significantly impacted by the introduction of a discharge consent at Blagdon fisheries at the outlet downstream of the trout rearing pens, which came into force from 1 February 2018. Since the discharge consent was introduced, compliance for samples collected at the site has proved challenging, particularly given the water quality variations of the four sources which flow into the site. For this year, one third of our total compliance failures were recorded at this site, and these were due to an increase in the suspended solids content of the Langford Spring and Rickford Spring sources flowing into the fish rearing pens, rather than activities taking place on site as part of the fish rearing programme.