Our performance targets from 2020 – 2025

Our reduced abstraction at this site during low flows will help to protect the local environment.

Our bills decreased by £28 (14%) in 2015 and have subsequently increased by less than RPI inflation since then. Our business plan anticipates bills to reduce by 4.5% in 2020 and will continue to reduce until at least 2025 (before inflation).

Bills can however, go up or down slightly depending on how we perform against our commitments. We have proposed a cap to ensure that this factor will not impact the average bill by more than £4 per annum.

Our customers have told us that the environment is important to them, although there are generally mixed views on the level of importance is relation to other improvements.

Based on what you have said to us, we aim to deliver significant improvements to our sites. These improvements are roughly equivalent to around 5 hectares of high quality new habitat.

Our conversations with customers found that the appearance of your tap water is important to you and you value an improvement.

Overall, customers supported a level of investment which will result in you being around half as likely to need to contact us about the appearance of your water in future.

Overall, customers supported a level of investment which will result in you being almost half as likely to need to contact us about the appearance of your water in future.

As the industry metric is still being developed by Ofwat, we have had conversations with customers about our performance based on the UK Customer Satisfaction Index, which allows us to compare our customer service performance with not only other water companies, but other utility companies and well known retailers as well.

Our customers told us that, although we already perform quite well, they would value an improvement in our customer service. Based on customer views, we have set ourselves the challenging aspiration of being the top performing utility company in the UK.

As D-MeX is a new performance commitment, we have not yet been able to set ourselves targets. We have however, identified a range of improvements that we will make to the services which we provide.

We recognise that leakage is a really important issue to customers and you see it being a waste of resources.

We have already made significant reductions to leakage levels and are one of the best performers in the industry, with one of the lowest levels of leakage.

Nonetheless, based on the level of reduction that you tell us that you value, we have set ourselves a target of reducing leakage by a further 15% by 2025. This level of reduction forms an important part of our plan to balance water demand with available water supply, without needing to develop new resources such as a reservoir.

We are a socially responsible company and it is important to us to make a positive contribution to our local communities as well as working with local partners to help to achieve our common goals

The specified initiatives within our business plan include:

1. A commitment to improving education and awareness of water issues: such as the number of pupils receiving a school talk on environmental matters/water efficiency or the number of initiatives undertaken as a result of the Bristol Water Youth Board;
2. A commitment to community leadership: such as the number of new water fountains opened within our supply area, which builds upon the success of the water fountains opened in Millennium Square and Queens Square;
3. Our support for the Bristol Refill campaign;
4. Our academic partnerships, such as our water efficiency test site with the University of West of England;
5. Our contribution to the Bristol City Mayor and West of England Combined Authority Regional strategies. An example includes the Active Roadworks initiative.
6. Our commitment to community engagement: such as the satisfaction with support to the festivals / community events that the Company has attended;
7. Our commitment to improving our customers’ experiences and opportunities at our lakes and recreational facilities;
8. To roll out the use of the Biodiversity Index toolkit where we work on land that we do not own;
9. To work with Wessex Water to understand our combined environmental impact and to provide joint billing messages;
10. To work with Bristol Waste on resource efficiency messages;
11. To form an active network on best practice around resource efficiency engagement with west of England utility companies;
12. To expand and align our vulnerability support with Wessex and other utilities.

Burst mains are an indicator of the health of our pipes, so we aim to keep the number of bursts stable over a long period of time as a minimum. The improvement that we forecast reflects the benefit from our activities to reduce leakage and supply interruptions.

Metering is widely regarded as the fairest way to pay for water. Our customers on the whole do not wish to see full compulsory metering of all our household customers.

We will continue to promote metering through our ‘Beat the Bill’ programme, which allows you to see whether your bill would be lower with a meter.

We will also continue to meter properties when ownership changes.

Our target is based our forecast of meter uptake and number of house moves from properties which do not currently have meter.

We are targeting a 5% reduction in water use. This reflects the continuation of our metering programme for customers who request a meter, and metering houses when ownership changes. We are also working with partners to help customers to reduce water wastage within their homes.

In 2017/18 we achieved zero customers in water poverty for the first time. We are proud of this level of performance and have set ourselves the challenging target of maintaining it in future.

Our extra care services for ‘vulnerable’ customers include for example, delivery of bottled water during a supply interruption, minicom services for deaf customers, bills in brail for blind customers and translated bills for customers who struggle to read the bill in English. Customers who would like these services can register through our Priority Services Register.

We have based on target based on feedback from our customers on the level of investment they would like to see.

We have recently finished a programme of work to protect towns which have over 25,000 people from the risk of a severe interruption to supply by installing a major new water main which could be used as an alternative source of supply should there be an issue.

As part of this next programme of investment we will extend the level of protection from a failure of any critical assets within these areas which could result in a supply interruption of over 24 hours.

In addition, over a period of ten years, we will also protect towns with a population of over 10,000 people from the risk of a sever supply interruption due to a failure in one of these critical assets.

A 10-year programme was the one which customers favoured, providing a balance between speed of improvement and impact on their bills.

Our customers have told us that alleviating low pressure is not one of their top priorities.

We will work to alleviate persistent low pressure where the costs are not prohibitively expensive. As we resolve issues for some properties, we expect issues to reported for other properties, with a net reduction in our low pressure register of 9 properties by 2025.

We have set ourselves challenging targets to work with farmers through catchment management to benefit the local environment.

Our target is to maintain the top level of performance, which means that it is extremely unlikely that we will ever need to restrict the supply of water to our customers due to a drought.

Reliability of supply was found to be one of our customers’ top priorities and we found from our research that our customers supported a significant level of improvement.

Our target reflects our forecast for the industry upper quartile. This is an approach Ofwat had proposed every company take across the industry.

Performance targets may be reset each year based on the actual upper quartile in the previous year. By definition, not every company will be able to achieve upper quartile performance.

Our performance against this metric has always been excellent, as we haven’t yet had any failing works. We plan to continue this level of performance in the future.

We aim to improve in this area so that our works run as efficiently as possible. We have set ourself a challenging target based on our analysis using our best levels of historical performance.

We are not yet able to assess how we perform compared to others, as this is a new industry wide measure. We have set out target level of performance based on our average historical performance.

It is important to us that customers think that we are doing a good job. One of the ways of measuring this is by asking customers whether they think we are providing value for money.

Over the next five years we plan to improve the services which we provide to you whilst reducing the overall level of the bill (before inflation). We have set ourselves a challenging target which includes a significant increase in the number of customers who think that we provide value for money. This would make us one of the best performing companies in this area.

We keep a close eye on the number of properties which are registered with us as being vacant, as we recognise that now and again, there are properties which are actually occupied and using water without receiving a bill. This means that other customers are effectively subsidising their water use. This is not fair to our bill paying customers and so we have set ourselves a target to reduce our level of void properties.

Our metering programme will help to do this and by 2025 we will bill around 1,000 more properties which would previously have been classified as voids.

Our WINEP requirements include:

1. The development of a Biodiversity Action Plan linked our Biodiversity Index;
2. Keeping track of and reducing invasive non-native species on our sites;
3. Investigating potentially harmful abstractions and considering alternative options;
4. Continuing our work to reduce any negative effects of our reservoirs on the environment in downstream rivers;
5. Undertaking investigations to determine causes of catchment water quality issues, and the potential to improve raw water quality using innovative approaches;
6. Implementing programmes of catchment management to improve water quality in certain sources, and to maintain the condition of our most special sites which are of national importance;
7. Implementing eel protection to meet regulatory standards and requirements.

We plan to deliver the top level of performance and meet these environmental standards all of the time in future.

We recognise that safe drinking water is a top priority for our customers. We plan to achieve the top level of performance against this metric to minimise the risk of any issues.