Bristol Water mid-year performance in 2021/22

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.

Natural asset conditions are being maintained through a mix of delivery, including successful community volunteering days coppicing withy wood from reedbeds around Blagdon and Chew Valley Lake. Despite this, there has been material deterioration to date, but we have a planned programme of work over the next few months. Such a deterioration at this point in time is also to be expected as a lot of the improvement projects take place during the winter months.

Our monitoring of mains repairs is based on our risk-based targeted investment approach to replace failing assets, through a mixture of renovation techniques but also to explore and exploit innovation opportunities in both operations and maintenance and Smart Network technologies.

Our operations and maintenance teams have already been through a transformation process from the maintenance-centric approaches of the past that focused on fixing the burst as quickly as possible to the customer-centric approaches of today that focus first on maintaining service to our customers wherever possible. This has led to 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 plan to continue exploring innovative approaches throughout the reporting period. We are looking exploring the continuation of optimised pressure management schemes, further development of dynamic and adaptive areas, as well as exploration of Smart Network techniques to exploit the vastly increased number of logging devices we have installed throughout our distribution network.

Unfortunately, we have seen an increase in our CRI in 2021 year to date when compared to 2019 and 2020.

Our target of 0 CRI would require us to have no failing compliance water samples collected throughout the year and, as we have had eighteen to date, the target will not be met.

Our score to date largely consists of the contribution from individual compliance failures at treatment works, which have a larger multiplier based on their output. We investigate each failure to consider what action and lessons can be learned, but generally these types of failures can occasionally occur without it reflecting a wider emerging issue. We keep the situation under review as an increase in the CRI score is unacceptable to us. Most investigations into compliance failures at customers’ taps have shown the cause to be property specific, and therefore not representative of water quality in the wider network.

Customer contacts for discoloured (black/orange/brown) water remain the biggest contributor to appearance contacts (70% of the total contacts). We are proactively investigating the underlying causes of discolouration in order to establish the relevant interventions required to reduce the risk of it recurring. Historically, discolouration can be primarily attributed to the disturbance of harmless iron sediments within the mains network (to the extent that it then results in customers feeling the need to contact us about the appearance of their water).

We are also working with external stakeholders to provide them with awareness and training for using hydrants in our area without giving rise to discolouration.

We are pleased to report that for the second consecutive year, we are on track to outperform our target. This demonstrates our continuing commitment to ensure the aesthetic quality of the water for our customers. As a large proportion of taste and odour contacts are associated with the internal plumbing system in customers’ homes, we have continued to make improvements to the information on our website to allow customers to self-serve to resolve these problems as quickly as possible.

C-MeX is split into a customer service survey and a perception survey; to date we achieved 3rd place on the customer service element and 6th on perception.

As things stand, we are pleased to be on track to outperform our ambition and of outperforming our ranking from the previous year. This encouraging level of performance is a result of a number of projects including our new customer website, a review of customer journeys and providing flexible service to support customers during the pandemic. Our ‘In their shoes’ campaign continues to underpin the service we provide, all staff consider what impact our work will have on the customer and to adjust the service accordingly.

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 will continue to invite our customers to our Market Engagement Events. This year, due to COVID-19, it was held as a virtual event in November. We invited our customers to discuss our Charges Scheme applicable from 1 April 2022, Adoption Codes, Fixed Price quoting and infrastructure reduction for water efficient new builds. This will give the customers a platform to speak directly to our team.

We aim to regularly to engage and listen to our developer services customers. We are for example sending regular newsletters by email to keep our customers who cannot attend the Market Engagement Events informed of the discussions.

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. A water resource zone is the largest possible area in which all resources can be shared. We use the water resource zone for operational management, water resource planning and drought management. The failure of this target is a function of the sensitivity of the Bristol Water supply demand balance, and the fact we only have one water resource zone, so either all our customers are at risk, or none of them. The methodology by which the assessment is carried out results in small changes in demand affecting whether we are in surplus or deficit. In reality this uncertainty is largely captured within the headroom allowance within the supply demand balance, so the customer risk is minimal.

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. This resilience is a result of our conjunctive use water resource system, with good management of the balance of water supplied from both our Mendip reservoir sources and the River Severn via the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal. 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. These actions are set out in our drought plan.

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 maintenance 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. We are pleased to report that we are on track to outperform our target for this year.

By providing the right level of care and investment in our assets we are able to provide a resilient supply of quality water with minimal interruptions. This is achieved by assessing all our assets to better understand which have the greater impact on our ability to meet our customer requirements. A lower number in this indicator identifies reduced asset downtime and increased reliability.

We continue to deliver industry-leading levels of leakage. Last year we recorded the lowest level of leakage we have ever achieved and we are on track to deliver an even lower level of leakage by the end of 2021/22.

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 (which has significantly impacted household night usage, a major variable in the leakage calculation), 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.

Similarly to 2020/21, our mid-year performance has been severely impacted by COVID-19. We were forced to pause our promotion of metering, as Covid restrictions meant that we have been unable to install as many meters as our customers would have ideally liked. Since the return into customer properties in April 2021 and the easing of lockdown restrictions our initial focus turned to managing the short-term impact, prioritising our most vulnerable customers through promotion of the Priority Services Register and the existing Free Meter Option applications.

Even though COVID-19 legal restrictions have eased, a reduced level of customer demand for meters, partly due to a reluctance on the part of customers to allow work inside their homes, has continued to have a negative impact upon our metering activities. Our “Peter the Meter” campaign has however returned to social media platforms, Radio and Letter drops. Our initial relaunch has seen a positive increase on optant applications.

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 2021.

Over recent years we have started a process of significantly increasing the level of pressure monitoring and other sensor deployment in our distribution network. This will ensure we can identify which properties are at risk of low pressure and rectify the problems for our customers in a much quicker timetable. It is therefore unlikely that our customers will experience water pressure below the minimum standard for long periods of time. Since 31 March 2021 six properties in Radstock have been added to the low pressure register but their pressure will be restored before the year end.

Reliability of water supply is a top priority for our customers. The Glastonbury and Street zones are supplied from Cheddar Water Treatment Works via a considerable length of “Critical Main” for which currently there is no redundancy. This scheme will ensure that a population of approximately 28,000 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 scheme is on track to be delivered in March 2023, meaning we would not be reporting any expected number of months delay to the project at the March 2025 trigger point.

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 20,646 customers receiving assistance through these measures, an increase of 1% over last year. The breakdown of these customers are as follows:

• 8,987 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
• 8,530 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
• 3,129 customers are on our ‘Discount for Low Income Pensioners’ 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.

In addition to the social tariff schemes, 3,379 households are currently benefitting from our ‘Restart’ scheme to clear their debt.

We also offer metering, water efficiency support and flexible payment plans to customers who may need support paying but do not need as much assistance as a social tariff.

This is a challenging target and regretfully we have not met our target for this year. We are forecasting to underperform throughout this five-year period on per capita consumption.

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. 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. Unfortunately, our 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.

This measure is an indication of our progress made against our published Vulnerability Action Plan. We continue to report on satisfaction levels because this is an area of focus and importance.

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. We have registered an additional 2,399 households on the PSR so far this year, taking the number registered from 13,407 to 15,806. Since April 2020 we have more than doubled the number of customers registered on the PSR.

We are continuing to expand the range of ways we communicate with our customers about our Priority Services, as we want to ensure every eligible customer is registered for the service. We have to date trained all of our customer facing staff, added prompts to all customer feedback surveys and have ‘Helping Hand’ cards for our field teams to leave with customers for more information. Our partnership work has also continued to grow to raise awareness of Priority Services. For example local foodbanks now hand out the ‘Helping Hand’ cards and this autumn we have been advertising the service on prescription bags in over 50 independent pharmacies (a joint promotion with Western Power Distribution and Wessex Water).

Due to our work this year to date with farmers in the catchments of our raw water sources, 164 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 are pleased that the improvement we have made to our operations indicate that at mid-year we are tracking to outperform our target for this year. This is despite some potentially significant events. To take one example, during July there was a burst to a 1200mm (4 feet) diameter main alongside the South Bristol link road between the A370 and A38. This represents the largest diameter pipe-burst we have experienced in a very long time. The burst was detected around 18:00 and isolated by 21:00 by which time massive volumes of water had flooded the ring road and the system supplying large parts of central and northern Bristol had drained. This resulted in a host of low pressure and no water calls to our switchboard. However, thanks to the readiness of our operational teams and the robust flexibility of the affected system at the time of the burst (i.e. full reservoir storage was able to provide back-fed support to the area), the properties interrupted were limited to areas of higher ground and only a few hundred properties were interrupted for over 3 hours, resulting in only 11 seconds being recorded for this metric.

We are substantially reducing the number of customer complaints by over 50% since 2020.

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 considerable better than last year’s upper quartile.

Complaint resolution and handling is a key focus of our customer experience strategy. Every complaint is handled by our Customer Care Team where a designated member of staff ensures that the complaint is resolved. The team provide root cause information which feeds into our learnings and future improvements to prevent repeat complaints. This in turn ensures we are reducing the chance of causing customers to complain.

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.

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. It is therefore encouraging that our level of performance to date has seen a considerable reduction from our baseline position on 31 March 2020. We have achieved this through the policy started in 2019/20 of metering potentially void properties proactively, and by working with Pelican to ensure that voids were periodically checked by aligning our processes and information systems. Our analysis of void properties has revealed that void rates tend to be higher for unmetered properties compared to those which are metered (as meter readings can identify consumption at a property), so we are continuing to increase meter penetration across our supply area, to help reduce the number of voids in our supply area. This reduction will lead to fairer bills for our customers overall as they will not be carrying the financial burden of other households that would not be being billed. In addition, we are continuing to use third party data providers to augment our existing data (such as via HM Land Registry).

We are pleased to report that our outage continues to remain low and indicates a high level of service. Our levels of service reflects our approach to maintaining our above-ground assets 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.

Value for money is an important concept in measuring whether customers consider that the service that we provide is worth what they pay. As this measure is based on annual survey data, a mid-year value is not applicable.

When customers make an assessment of value for money it goes beyond just the price they pay for their water. Price is one of many facets that customers consider when making their assessment. For customers, it is also about whether in purchasing our water they are also spending well and spending wisely. Another interesting component of perceived value is trust. We continue to aim to build genuine trust throughout our communities and develop meaningful partnerships with a range of organisations. Our Social Contract 2021/22 Benefit & Transparency Report explores the progress we have made on our community initiatives, which are aimed at maintaining the trust of our customers and stakeholders.

We have also again 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.

We have started work to deliver on our WINEP obligations and projects have progressed well through 2020/21 and the first half of 2021/22. However, as we are only expecting to complete 25 schemes by the end of this financial year, we can only expect to be 96% compliant. The other scheme was a date change by the Environment Agency in a later version of the WINEP than the one specific by Ofwat for calculating this performance commitment.

Current ongoing WINEP projects include the Abstraction Sustainability investigations (at eight of our sites), WINEP Adaptive Management programmes, as well as catchment management across the Cheddar, Axe and Egford catchments. Delivery of the Biodiversity Index enhancements are being scoped and planned for this period and will align with the recently developed Natural Asset Plans and Natural Asset Register. All of these projects are progressing well and are on track for delivery as required under the WINEP programme.

There are 50 lines on the WINEP, which include: schemes, risk assessments, surveillance programmes, a biodiversity action plan and a feasibility study.

The timely delivery of the WINEP schemes for this metric is measured slightly differently to our WINEP compliance performance commitment; our forecast underperformance for the latter metric does not impact our commitments for this metric.

Although we are not on track to meet our 100% compliance target for this year, 99% of the samples collected in the first nine months of the year were fully compliant with the discharge consent conditions. This is an improvement compared to our performance in 2019 and 2020.

Extreme seasonal fluctuations in the quality of the water sources we use for treatment will always present a challenge to our commitment to full compliance, however we are constantly reviewing the reasons for the small number of failures with a view of implementing remedial measures to drive our compliance figure higher. There have been three non-compliant samples out of the 256 compliance samples collected to date across all discharge locations.