Bristol Water mid-year performance in 2020/21

Our mid-year position demonstrates how the natural environment and the company’s natural assets require continuous monitoring and maintenance to balance the risks and issues of climate change, invasive species, operational activities, and natural succession of habitats.

Our biodiversity has deteriorated since the end of March 2020 following the identification of an Invasive Non-Native Species within the Reedbed assets at Chew Valley Lake. The invasive plant species, Himalayan Balsam, was identified and surveyed at locations around Chew Valley Lake during September 2020. The extent of the growth of this invasive plant directly impacts the condition of the Wetland Reedbed/Swamp assets.

Over the remainder of this year, we have identified a Tree Planting opportunity at our Axbridge Treatment Works. At this site we have an opportunity to convert a lesser valued natural asset (semi-improved neutral grassland) to a higher valued natural asset (broadleaved plantation parkland).

We are pleased to be on track to meet our target for this year. The number of repairs has been managed through targeted mains replacement and 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.

We are pleased that our performance indicates a high level of water quality performance.

Our CRI to date largely consists of isolated bacteriological failures at service reservoirs and customer properties where our investigations concluded that they were not representative of the water quality being supplied to consumers and that there was no wider issue within the network. This suggests that the risk to our customers from water compliance sample failures causing an impact on their drinking water has been minimal, but we are never complacent in aiming for zero failures and thoroughly test the root cause of problems and potential risks.

Customer contacts for discoloured (orange/brown) water remain the biggest contributor to appearance contacts. This discolouration can be primarily attributed to the disturbance of harmless iron sediments within the mains network. Our systematic flushing programme has proven to be effective as a first stage intervention in removing iron sediment before it can cause a problem (to the extent that it then results in customers feeling the need to contact us about the appearance of their water).

The performance so far in 2020 is similar to previous years but is not on track to deliver the reduction in our business plan. There is no single cause, but the most significant factors that have prevented our improved network performance from achieving this target has been third party use of hydrants and standpipes as well as individual burst main events.

Historically, the majority of taste and odour contacts are associated with problems that develop within internal domestic plumbing systems. Updates to our website have helped to improve the information available to customers. As our network has been working well, this has also contributed to a reduction in taste and odour contacts.

We were pleased that our C-MeX scores in wave 1 were the highest customer satisfaction rates we have achieved. Likewise, we were pleased that both our billing and operational scores were higher in wave 1 than in 2019/20, which underlines our customers’ approval of the quality and reliability of the services we provide. In wave 2 our customer satisfaction scores increased to a level that ranks us at fifth place in the industry. Over the first half of 2020/21 we are likely to be ranked 7th overall.

We are undertaking a range of initiatives over the next few months to improve our customers’ perceptions, some of which revolve around embedding our new branding and publicising it, as well as promoting our educational activity and local community projects, such as the Bristol Water Foundation and the Water Efficiency campaign.

In the first half of 2020/21, our D-MeX score appears to be the best in the industry. We have a dedicated team which is responsible for processing applications from developers, SLPs and NAVs and we have worked to create a closer working relationship with developers and self-lay providers. We have made significant improvements in timeliness and effectiveness of our response to these customers and we publish information that makes it easier for developers and SLPs to understand our costs and approach to developer service.

As this measure is based on annual data, a mid-year value is not applicable.

Due to the integrated nature of our water sources, we operate a single water resource zone. The sensitivity of the Bristol Water supply demand balance, and the fact we only have one water resource zone, significantly impacts this metric. Due to the dry weather in summer 2020/21, we are likely to fail this measure for the year, because it measures the risk in 2045 if we took no action in a severe drought. This industry standard metric is therefore of limited relevance to performance today.

We constantly monitor our water resource position and despite the hot dry spell over the last few years, we have managed our resources to ensure customer supplies are maintained without the need for any drought restrictions. If prolonged dry weather were to continue, our close monitoring of the resource position would enable us to identify when a drought is developing and ensure that steps are taken early to help reduce demand for water and manage the effects of drought.

If we were to experience a drought in reality the risk to our customers of experiencing severe drought restrictions would be reduced via the implementation of temporary use bans, sometimes called a “hosepipe ban”, whereby restrictions are put in place on a number of customer activities, such as watering their gardens, cleaning their cars or watering their plants using a hosepipe. Such measures have however not been introduced by Bristol Water since 1990.

Unplanned events mean potential interruptions to the treatment and supply of clean and wholesome water. The more we can reduce the occurrence of unplanned events on our treatment works the more reliable the supply of water; this results in reduced asset downtime and increased reliability of supply for our customers. We aim to provide the right maintenance and whole life care to our assets to ensure that they are reliable and efficient; our steady performance over the last few years demonstrates that we continue to achieving this balance.

Leakage reduction is consistently a top priority across all our customer research and engagement. It is therefore pleasing that we continue to deliver industry leading levels of leakage reduction. This is despite the fact that we have experienced a complex combination of change of customer usage habits in response to COVID-19, combined with difficult weather conditions in the spring and the summer.

The combination of targeted investment in our network, improved monitoring (leak repairs continue to be monitored so that the largest are targeted as highest priority) and control activities, and our proactive approach to leakage management and leakage reduction initiatives, such as pressure management, continues to see us reduce leakage levels further. Our excellent 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 minimise leakage.

Our performance has traditionally been driven by our meter optant policy (those customers who opt into receiving water via a meter by contacting us to request a meter fitting) and our selective metering policy (whereby we install a meter at a property whenever there is a change of occupier), which are in turn impacted by our information campaigns.

In order to support efforts to control the spread of Covid-19 and protect our customers and employees, we suspended all metering activity in the first half of this year.

Customer demand for meters (meter optants) temporarily dropped, as our customers’ attention was understandably focussed elsewhere. Where customers asked for a meter, but due to COVID-19 we could not fit one, we temporarily provided them with an alternative “assessed” charge instead.

We re-commenced our metering activities as soon as it was safe and legal to do so. However, the continuing uncertainty caused by the pandemic has continued to decrease the number of applications for a meter we receive from our customers.

As this measure is based on annual data, a mid-year value is not applicable.

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 progress to date can be found on our website and in our Mid-Year Social Contract Benefit and Transparency Report, published in December 2020.

It is unlikely that our customers will experience water pressure below the minimum standard; since the end of March 2020 an additional 13 properties, all located in Radstock, have been identified as receiving low pressure. The insufficient pressure has been caused by being on a shared supply pipe (rather than their property receiving water via their own supply pipe). We have plans in place to conduct remedial work in order to address seven of the recently added properties at risk of poor pressure identified in Radstock.

The Glastonbury and Street zones are supplied from Cheddar Water Treatment Works via a considerable length of “Critical Main” for which there is no redundancy. This scheme will ensure that 13,000 customers 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.

The Wells to Glastonbury and Street area mains scheme in Somerset is expected to be delivered in November 2022.

As this measure is based on annual data, a mid-year value is not applicable.

We have historically been able to ensure zero percentage of our customers are in water poverty as a result of our focus on increasing the number of customers on our social tariffs. We offer three discounted social tariffs to make sure we can help customers who find it hard to pay their water charges, with 19,755 customers receiving assistance through these measures to date. Below is a breakdown of each scheme and the number of customers currently registered:

• 8,430 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
• 3,177 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
• 8,148 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.

We also know that due to the additional water usage in households, arising from a greater number of people working from home due to COVID-19, some customers will see their metered bills increase. We are working hard to ensure that the financial support we have available for those struggling to pay reaches those eligible.

This is a challenging target and regretfully, based on our performance to date, we are forecasting to not achieve it for this year. This reflects more household consumption and less business consumption with people working at home due to Covid-19. Only the household consumption counts for this metric for this switch in where water is used.

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. Unfortunately, our mid-year performance, has been severely impacted by COVID-19, because customers are rightly using more water as they are at home more and there is enhanced focus on hygiene and hand washing.

As this measure is based on annual data, a mid-year value is not applicable.

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.

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.

When setting our targets we assumed that a planned national data share project would now be live, as it was planned to go ahead in 2020/21. This would have granted us data access to customers in vulnerable circumstances from other utility providers, as customers would only need to register with one company rather than all of those signed up to the project. This national project has however been put on hold and so achieving the target has become more challenging.

Over the last six months we have focused on promoting our Priority Services across our digital channels, as well as asking staff to mention and signpost it to customers whenever they have the opportunity. We have also partnered with Western Power Distribution and agreed a local data share.

Due to our work this year to date with farmers in the catchments of our raw water sources, 39 kilogrammes of phosphorus per year will not be lost from the land into the water environment. This will contribute to our aim to maintain raw water quality in our sources, so that the water is easier to treat to a potable standard. It will also help to maintain our SSSIs in favourable conservation status and surrounding waterbodies in good ecological status or potential under the Water Framework Directive. Our contributions to this performance commitment helps to benefit wider society, by improving our wider natural capital.

We have extended our operational techniques to minimise supply interruptions to customers. These include rezoning from one discrete area of supply to another, on-demand supplies from bowsers, infusion tankering, overland connections and ‘live’ clamp repairs. The extent of the use of these techniques means that we no longer interrupt customers for more than three hours for any planned or warned interruption. We also use the techniques to limit the length of unplanned interruptions and to reduce the number of customers impacted.

Our performance this year has however been dominated by two large events. A burst on a 10” main on Rose Green Road, Royate Hill in Eastville and third-party damage to a 12” main in Yate which have resulted in 13 minutes 41 seconds (84% of the total to date).

We have also seen an increase in third-party damage events that have led to an increase in our supply interruptions performance, which have formed c50% of the minutes lost in the first half of the year.

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. We are pleased that despite the challenging environment due to COVID-19 we are on track to deliver a level of service that would be better than last year’s industry top quarter performance level. This is despite the fact that due to COVID-19 we had to stop all non-essential work in line with the government guidance.

This metric enables us to consider the following:

• The use of turbidity as a measure to provide assurance of the optimal operation of filter performance, where filtration is used to address identified risks associated with chlorine resistant pathogens in the source water;
• The impact of turbidity on the efficiency of disinfection processes;
• The effect that turbidity has on the aesthetics of the treated water.

We have a long track record of achieving zero turbidity events and we are confident that this will continue into futures years as a result of our approach.

Although the level of voids is higher than our year-end target, it reduced over the first half of the year from the 2.54% at the end of 2019/20. Therefore we forecast that with further reductions we can meet the target. The risk to our customers arising from a higher level of void properties is that these are at risk of being unknowingly occupied and therefore debt could be building. It is very important that we keep a close management on the void level to prevent this happening.

One method we have undertaken to reduce the number of voids is by performing ongoing checks of HM Land Registry, to establish whether our records of void properties align to the records of ownership of the registry. Another method is to conduct property visits. Although this activity cannot take place during the Covid-19 lockdowns, we will continue to undertake such visits when the level of restriction allows.

We are pleased to report that our outage level continues to remain low. Our high levels of service reflects our approach by responding immediately to unplanned outage failures - we aim to fix all outages within a working day. This means that unless there is a reason why the outage cannot be fixed that is outside of our control (for example due to the lead time required on parts to fix the outage or because of specific treatment process conditions) all outages are addressed before they exceed the 24 hour duration criteria.

As this measure is based on annual survey data, a mid-year value is not applicable. However, the increase in both our billing and operational C-MeX scores compared to last year would insinuate that customers feel they are getting an increased value for money, and therefore would result in us achieving a higher result than in previous years when the survey is conducted at the end of the year. We have also achieved an encouraging level of performance in the CCW Water Matters survey. The survey is a useful proxy method for our customers to understand our performance, as it includes a question on how far customers agreed that the water services they receive represents value for money.

There are 50 lines on the WINEP, which include: schemes, risk assessments, surveillance programmes, a biodiversity action plan and a feasibility study. As none of the WINEP schemes are due for completion in 2020/21 we are able to forecast that we will meet our target for this year.

There are 50 lines on the WINEP, which include: schemes, risk assessments, surveillance programmes, a biodiversity action plan and a feasibility study. As none of the WINEP schemes are due for completion in 2020/21 we are able to forecast that we will meet our target for this year.

There have been six non-compliant samples out of a total of 359 collected, with the samples being sourced from two sites: Blagdon fisheries and Barrow Treatment Works.

Our ability to report on full compliance has been significantly impacted since 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 the site has proved challenging ever since. This year four failures were reported between February and May at that site. One of these failures was a consequence of staff restrictions due to COVID-19, which led to a change in the operation of the rearing programme, which resulted in fish residing for longer in the holding pens. The subsequent deterioration in quality which lead to the ammonium compliance failure in May is understood to be a consequence of this change in operation.

In response to these challenges, additional control measures have been put into place since June 2020 to ensure representative samples could be collected consistently at the discharge point (at the outlet of the fish farm) and work has continued throughout the summer to improve water quality monitoring and install equipment which will reduce the likelihood of future non-compliance.

Even if the Blagdon fisheries consent was not included, extreme seasonal fluctuations in the quality of the water sources we use for treatment will always present a challenge in achieving our target of full compliance. We are however constantly reviewing the reasons for the small number of failures with a view of implementing remedial measures to drive our compliance figure higher.