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02 December 2019
News
Performing strongly against a challenging backdrop
Financial, social and environmental highlights
Further financial updates
Looking to the future
Leading on innovation
Building a resilient network
People at our heart
Commenting on Anglian Water’s results for the half year to 30 September 2019, Chief Executive Peter Simpson said:
“As we enter the final six months of our current five-year business plan we continue to provide best-in-class customer service to our seven million customers, leading the industry on reducing leakage, creating and maintaining a resilient network, and safeguarding our environment for future generations, while delivering strong financial performance. We were called out for praise by Ofwat in its 2018/19 Service Delivery Report, published in October, in which we were ranked the top-performing water company in England and Wales for our record across a wide range of performance measures.
“Yet of all our activity this year, I am most proud of the ground-breaking steps we have taken to set out Anglian Water’s purpose as an organisation and embed public interest into our company constitution for the long term. In July we became the first UK water company – and, we believe, the first UK utility – to make a legal commitment to consider the impact of every decision we make on our community and the environment, as well as ensuring fair returns for our shareholders. This change to our Articles of Association crystallises a journey we’ve been on for many years and will ensure that public interest remains at the heart of Anglian Water for generations to come.
“In a period in which we have seen the impacts of climate change becoming ever more apparent in the East of England, the social and environmental challenges our fast-growing region faces have been brought into sharp focus. Groundwater levels in some areas have been at their lowest for 30 years; we’ve seen the UK’s hottest ever temperature recorded in Cambridge, and our customers faced some of the most significant flooding seen in our region after unprecedented heavy rainfall at Wainfleet in Lincolnshire in June.
“We continue to prepare ourselves to meet these challenges over our next five-year business plan and beyond, through a long-term programme of strategic investment. Our plans include the installation of a million smart meters and the creation of a new Alliance partnership which will deliver 500km of pipeline to ensure we can move water around our network in times of need. We must invest now to ensure resilient supplies for the generations to come, a view supported by the majority of our customers, 500,000 of whom were engaged in the development of our plans.
“We passionately believe that our plan is the right one to safeguard the future of our region and enable it to flourish. However, it is not financeable based on Ofwat’s Draft Determination, as we stated in our formal response in August. We have striven to find further cost efficiencies, made changes to our total expenditure (totex) plan and accepted Ofwat’s proposal to test its new funding model, Direct Procurement for Customers, to finance a vital new treatment works at Elsham in the north of our region. These changes will see bills reduce by around 1.1 per cent over five years. We continue to work with Ofwat in the run up to Final Determination, to be issued later this month, and hope to reach an outcome which will meet the needs of our customers and the environment.
“Our priority over the remainder of the year is to complete our current investment programme of work, our largest to date. It has enabled us to deliver the best customer service of any water and water recycling company in England and Wales, as rated by Ofwat’s qualitative measure. Not only that, we are on track to improve on our industry-leading performance on leakage and deliver our best-ever performance on drinking water quality – ready, in short, to hit the ground running at the start of our next five-year plan in April 2020.”
To read the full report, please click here.