Fast facts

A quick guide to your water company

Our Purpose is to bring environmental and social prosperity to the region we serve through our commitment to Love Every Drop. 

Saving every drop

We operate in one of the driest areas of the country so it’s important we encourage everyone to save water to make sure there’s enough water to go around for everyone, both today and tomorrow. Our commitment to water saving is – encapsulated in our motto: Love Every Drop.

  • We're doing our bit by investing in projects to improve our infrastructure and our resilience to drought.
  • By being more efficient with the water we use, we can better manage the increased demand in our region.
  • Everyone can do their bit to help save water. Read our tips here.

Leakage

  • Minimising the amount of water lost to leaks is a top priority – every day we have 300 people finding leaks.  
  • We have the best record for detecting and tackling leaks in the UK per kilometre of pipe – around half the industry average – but we always want to go even further.  
  • In 2020, we successfully reduced leakage to our lowest ever levels, the ninth year in a row we have beaten our leakage target. 
  • From 2020-2025, we’re proposing to invest millions more to reduce leakage by another 22% by 2025. 

Our customers

  • We supply 4.3 million people with high-quality drinking water, and collect used water from over six million of you across the region.
  • We welcome almost two million people to our water parks and recreational sites each year. 
  • We were ranked the top-performing water and water recycling company by Ofwat across AMP6 (2015-2020).  
  • We also stepped up to support our communities throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, launching our £1 million Positive Difference Fund in April 2020, and by playing a leading role in Business in the Community’s Covid-19 National Business Response Network.  
  • We continue to ensure our long-standing commitment to working in the public interest, in 2019 becoming the first major UK utility to enshrine social and environmental purpose into the fabric of our Company constitution when we enhanced our Articles of Association. 

Investing in our services

  • Between 2020 and 2025, we are planning to invest £6.5 billion to secure supply and improve our services – our biggest investment yet!  
  • This includes the delivery of 500 kilometres of interconnecting pipelines to move water from areas of abundant supply to areas where there is a shortage, as well as investment to reduce the number of customers reliant on a single source of supply, and the roll-out of more than a million smart meters. 

The Anglian Water region

  • We’re the largest water and sewerage company in England and Wales geographically, covering 20% of the land area (27,476 km²). 
  • We operate in the driest region in the UK - receiving only two-thirds of the national average rainfall each year (approximately 600mm). 
  • We serve an increasingly growing area – by 2025, household numbers are predicted to grow by another 175,000 homes. 
  • Our region has over 3,300 km of rivers and is home to the UK’s only wetland national park – the Norfolk Broads. 

Drinking water supply

  • We operate 143 water treatment works, supplying over 1 billion litres of water every day to 2.5 million households and 110,000 businesses.
  • We control and maintain 38,185 km (23,727 miles) of water mains. Laid end to end this is further than a trip to Sydney, Australia, and back!
  • We also operate and maintain 392 water towers and storage points.
  • Your drinking water starts its journey in one of 425 boreholes, eight reservoirs and nine rivers.
  • Each year we carry out over 350,000 tests to ensure our water is to the highest quality possible.
  • Despite having a third more properties in our region, we’re using slightly less water than we did in 1989. 

Pay for what you use

  • Almost 92% of our customers currently have a water meter.  
  • We believe meters are the fairest way to charge for water; if you don’t use it, you don’t pay for it. 
  • Switching to a meter is entirely free and if you’re not happy, you can switch back anytime within the first two years. Last year, over 28,000 households fitted a water meter. 
  • A meter cuts household water usage by 5-15%, saving you an average of £171 a year on your bill. 

Recycling used water

  • We operate 1,128 water recycling centres, collecting and treating used water from 2.5 million households and 110,000 businesses.
  • We collect around 927 million litres of used water everyday.
  • It reaches us through 76,000 km (47,181 miles) of sewers which, laid end to end, would be almost twice the earth’s circumference.

Our people

  • We employ more than 5,000 people. 
  • In total, around 8,500 direct and indirect staff work with us. 
  • Anglian were named the UK’s Best Place to Work 2019 by Glassdoor, awarded Business in the Community’s Health and Wellbeing Award for 2019 and hold the RoSPA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) gold award for health and safety, our 16th year of RoSPA recognition. 

Environmental custodians

  • Between 2020 and 2025, we’re investing £800million in protecting and enhancing the region’s environment with a programme of work more than double that of the previous five years. 
  • 2020 saw our best-ever year for renewable energy, producing 131GWh of energy from our renewable energy sources – enough to power 40,000 homes for a year. 
  • In 2020, we beat our carbon reduction targets by reducing capital carbon by 61% and operational carbon by 34% - a strong step towards our commitment to becoming a net zero carbon business by 2030. 
  • We have been awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Sustainable Development to hold for a further five years from 2020. 
  • Because we invest millions in used water treatment processes, our river water is the cleanest it’s been since the industrial revolution. Nearly 90% of our region’s bathing water beaches have ‘Excellent’ or ‘Good’ water quality. 
  • Nineteen Blue Flags (recognising ‘Excellent’ water quality and environmental education programmes) fly at beaches on our coastline, along with 19 Seaside Awards.
  • We work closely with local authorities, the Environment Agency and other stakeholders to identify and prevent potential pollution risks to our bathing waters.