Bristol Water mid-year performance in 2019/20

Our mid-year performance is currently reflecting our position at the end of 2018/19. This is due to the known seasonality of work delivery. Both negative and positive impacts on the BI score will be delivered during the late autumn to spring months. In other words, any changes to the BI score will not materialise until year-end. For example, works which disturbs trees and hedgerow will not take place until after the bird nesting season, which ends in September. The autumn and spring periods are also the optimal time to plant trees and therefore positive impacts are also delivered towards the end of the financial year.

Bristol Water has historically reduced bursts using a bespoke predictive burst model. Over the last year we have sought to improve this predictive modelling capability and will continue to make significant improvements into next year. This takes the form of introducing far more sophisticated models which use many more environmental and asset related factors. This improved planning means we are confident that our investment will reduce the number of bursts below the target level by the end of the year.

Our Water Quality team collects samples 365 days a year from across our 2,400 square kilometre supply area to ensure we comply with the sampling regime, with no exemptions applicable for example for weather conditions. The sampling schedule is aligned to a sophisticated computer-controlled programme so that water quality is checked right from source to customers' taps. Regulatory failures for MZC parameters such as lead, taste and odour are often attributed to the customer’s domestic plumbing system and therefore are out of the control of the company. These are the reasons behind are performance to date in 2019; we have very little influence over these results.

This year the SIM methodology has been significantly revised and the data requirements were not available for a mid-year assessment. We do however expect our SIM performance to improve by the end of the year as we have increased the resource in our contact centre and we are continually working on improvements to give our customers the answers they need as quickly as possible, such as improvements in how customers can contact us online. We are not however forecasting to meet our target, which is to achieve a level of SIM performance that would mean we were ranked at least 5th in the sector.

Although we forecast to miss our challenging target, we have delivered a variety of projects to address our performance in the first six months of 2019/20:

• We have piloted triaging customer contact in the operation contact centre using more customer photos and videos. This enables us to better understand our customers' problems, which helps to speed up the resolution of the issue after the first point of contact.
• We have also been upskilling and knowledge sharing between our operations and customer teams.
• We have increased the scope of the Customer Care Team to track customer requests throughout the journey and keep customers fully informed with progress made against their jobs.

We use the information from the work orders to better understand our assets and help to implement appropriate measures to ensure reliability. Effective maintenance and management of assets using such information allows us to run our plant in a resilient manner that will consistently produce high quality water. We have a long track record of outperforming this measure and we are again forecasting to outperform against our target, which is an encouraging indicator of the long-term health of our above-ground assets.

This measure is based on annual calculations but we are confident about our future performance; we can predict that for the fifth consecutive year, we will be able to report that our hosepipe ban risk frequency is better than our target. In fact by the end of this reporting year it will have been 30 years since we last introduced a hosepipe ban (in 1990).

The combination of targeted investment in our network, improved monitoring and control activities, and our proactive approach to leakage management and leakage reduction initiatives, such as pressure management, continues to see us actively working to reduce actual leakage levels further. As a result of this, we expect to outperform our annual leakage target. As a result of our work we have been recognised by CCWater as the top performer in leakage, after setting ourselves ambitious targets and working hard to achieve them.

During 2017/18 we agreed with Ofwat a number of changes to how we report on our performance, including on leakage. Without taking into account technical changes, our mid-year leakage performance is 37.3 Ml/day. As this is a higher number than the actual leakage level, we have committed to calculating financial incentives (which reduce customer bills) on this measure of leakage.

Our metering programme is driven by customer requests, and installing meters on the change of occupier of a property. In this context, we no longer expect to achieve the end of year target of 65.9% meter penetration. This is due to waning customer demand for meters and a slowing housing market limiting the opportunities for metering. We have designed an extensive marketing programme, including work with Aardman Animations, to help increase metering uptake.

Identifying new properties at risk can arise as a consequence of our proactive monitoring of our network or as a consequence of poor pressure complaints raised by customers. Three properties in Radstock have been removed from our low pressure register in the last six months; these properties now receive a sufficient level of water as they have now been removed from a shared supply pipe that was originally being used to supply ten separate properties. As a result of our improvements we have reduced the number of properties at risk by 38% since 2016/17 and by 18% throughout this reporting period to date.

The decrease in negative billing contacts is, for this year, partly as a direct result of the ‘10 a week program’ that was put into place to proactively ‘clear down’ open customer contact jobs. Following the introduction of this programme we were able to reduce the numbers of customers having to chase us for a resolution of an issue.

The number of contacts for the appearance of our customers' water remains the greatest proportion of our overall contacts. Despite significant activity on the network, including an ambitious mains renovation programme, the number has reduced compared to the previous year. We have done so through improvements in our network monitoring (such as installing pressure monitors into every district meter area and flow loggers into every waste water meter district); by doing so we able to understand more intelligently how water moves around our network and thus enabling us to take action to reduce areas where there is little water movement. It is in these areas of low water movement that sediment can accumulate, which can then understandably generate customer contacts about the appearance of water.

This measure is based on annual calculations, but we are confident about our future performance based on our outperformance to date. We currently support 17,790 customers through our social tariffs; in the first six months of 2019/20 we have accepted a further 2,170 customers onto our social tariffs:

• An additional 1347 have been accepted our ‘Assist’ social tariff. This tariff offers significant bill discounts to those customers least able to afford their bill, following a means assessment;
• An additional 89 have been accepted onto our WaterSure Plus metered tariff. This tariff is for metered customers in receipt of certain benefits and are defined by the government as ‘vulnerable’, either because they have a medical condition or a large family; and
• An additional 734 have been accepted our Pension Credit social tariff. This tariff 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.

We are committed to ensuring that those who struggle to pay will be given the help they need.

One of the 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. We have already instigated the creation of the Resource West partnership with University of West of England (UWE), Bristol Waste, Bristol Energy and other organisations to enhance the promotion of water efficiency in our supply area.

During 2017/18 we agreed with Ofwat a number of changes to how we report on our performance, including on per capita consumption. Without taking into account technical changes, our per capita consumption performance is 160.6 litres per person per day.

The successful delivery of the Southern Resilience Scheme in March 2018 (a £27m water infrastructure project) has significantly reduced the number of consumers at risk from 288,589 to 9,063 across our supply area including Weston-Super- Mare, Cheddar, Burnham-on-Sea and Glastonbury and the northern part of Bristol. The scheme involved constructing 30 kilometres of new mains to reinforce and support our southern supply area. The scheme means that if there is an emergency we can get our customers’ water supply back much more quickly.

Similarly to last year, we have seen an unusually warm and dry year; normally dry, sunny and warm summer weather would be ideal conditions for algal blooms. However, the mid-year numbers suggests that our catchment management initiatives have been much more successful than expected in improving water quality. This means that water will not be as expensive to treat as would have been the case had algal bloom frequency continue to increase as it did in the previous reporting period. It also means that the ecological condition should be more favourable than would be the case had the algae been allowed to continue to proliferate. This is important as the reservoirs are nationally, and in the case of Chew Valley Reservoir, internationally designated habitats (SSSI and SPA).

This measure is based on annual calculations. Despite the challenging target, we are continuing to improve our performance for our annual survey year on year; there has been a continuing upwards trend since 2015 and results from the Consumer Council for Water's report 'Water Matters' are extremely positive. Water Matters in an annual survey which compares our service to other water companies in the UK and we ranked on top of the league table for overall satisfaction with water supply with 97% satisfaction. We have ranked in the upper quartile in the CCWater Matters survey for the last two years.

The mid-year reported figure of 7.6 minutes includes a contribution of 1.6 minutes for a single incident on the Royate Hill Trunk main in July 2019. Throughout 2019 we have instigated a new strategy, designed to focus responses to supply interruptions on keeping customers in supply instead of our old approach, which was to prioritise the repair of the faults that lead to the supply interruptions. As part of this strategy, new techniques and equipment have been successfully deployed on a number of unplanned events, avoiding interruptions to supply, including direct infusion through tankers, as well as the temporary deployment of 'Arlington' tanks which enable pumping of water directly to a number of customers.

Our performance is predominantly driven by the change in the national grid electrify factor used to compute emissions, which is outside the Company’s control. However other influential factors include the wet weather over the past year causing a reduction in business demand, preferential use of sources from which water can be transported gravitationally, reduced leakage and our energy optimisation programme, have all helped to reduce carbon emissions. As a result we are forecasting to meet this year’s target.

Water quality is at the heart of our monitoring and maintenance of our treatment works, to ensure high standards are maintained in our assets. We have a long track record of achieving zero turbidity events. We are forecasting to again be successful in ensuring consistently good treated water enters our supply system by preventing any turbidity failures this year.

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. We are pleased to report we anticipate that will meet our target for this year. Regardless of our promising performance in the first half of the year, we are continuously reviewing all causes of customer dissatisfaction and this has helped us to find areas that we can improve on, such as the introduction of real time feedback, ‘Live Chat’, a redesign of our bill and the increased use of social media to keep customers informed of incidents and planned works.

Our performance is significantly impacted by the introduction of a discharge consent (which came into force from 1 February 2018) at Blagdon fisheries (downstream of the trout rearing pens). Compliance for samples collected at this site has proved challenging, particularly with respect to ammonium, dissolved oxygen and phosphate parameters. We are continuing to work with the EA to assess how to measure the environmental need at this site, which is subject to significant seasonal changes in the quality of the various inflows which supply the pens, including Blagdon Lake and a number of springs. The introduction of this consent has meant that the number of compliance failures has increased, even though improvements at other major treatment sites such as Purton have reduced the number of failures elsewhere.