Bristol Water performance in 2017/18

We have met our target for this year for this measure. There has been an improving trend in our biodiversity improvement since we created this measure in 2014-15. Working with our partners such as Avon Wildlife Trust, local schools and land owners we have created new habitats which will improve the biodiversity and support wildlife across a wider stretch of the landscape we serve.

As a result of the adverse weather conditions during late February/early March, a significant impact on the outbreak of burst mains was seen in a relatively short period. This resulted in over 250 burst mains in March 2018, of which more than 70% occurred in the first week alone. As a comparison, the 5-year average for burst mains in the month of March is 68.

Without these additional bursts due to the severe weather, we estimate that mains bursts would have been at 1,043 (rather than the 1,222 total for 2017/18) and at a similar level to the previous year.

Our Water Quality team collects samples 365 days a year from across our 2,400 square kilometre supply area to ensure that water quality is checked against the stringent legal standards from source to customers' taps.

During 2017 our sampling at customer properties identified four nickel failures associated with internal plumbing deficiencies (nickel is used in the chromium plating process for taps and can leach into the water supply). Although these failures were solely attributable to plumbing issues within customer properties, they had the effect of reducing our MZC figure from 99.98% down to 99.93%.

Our performance is below the level where we would have expected to be when we started the year, primarily due, to four significant incidents (Sea Mills burst, Willsbridge burst, Clevedon precautionary boil water notice and the freeze/thaw related supply interruption incidents at the end of the year) which have impacted significantly on this measure. We estimate that we received an additional 10,837 contacts as a result of these incidents alone. We have worked throughout the year on a number of projects to drive improvement for the 2017/18 results but the impact was not enough to mitigate the effects of these incidents.

We undertook a range of lessons learnt research after the incidents to understand how we can improve our response to similar events in future. This research showed that customers were generally satisfied with our response. Customers who were dissatisfied with our response to the bursts at Sea Mills and Willsbridge cited the need to improve the distribution of bottled water to those in need. We took this into account when responding to the precautionary boil water notice in Clevedon and found that this improved customer satisfaction.

In 2017/18, 93.1% of consumers surveyed considered that it was easy to contact us by phone.

Our analysis suggests that our score was adversely impacted by the precautionary boil water notice in Clevedon in January 2018,. This may have been due to the high volume of calls from the weeks following our incident in January.

To score highly in this measure, customers expect us to have quick and accurate information so we are working on improvements to make information more easily available to our employees so they can answer questions consistently and correctly the first time.

We recorded 3,279 unplanned maintenance events during 2017-18, which is successfully lower than our target of 3,976. This is an indicator of the long-term health of our assets.

We have for the third consecutive year, reported a hosepipe ban risk frequency that is better than our target. It has been 28 years since we last introduced a hosepipe ban (in 1990) and we continue to outperform our target for this measure.

We have set ourselves challenging leakage targets; to reduce leakage by 12% between 2015 and 2020. The actual leakage level for 2017/18 was 46.6 Ml/day.

This year we have seen an unusual increase in the number of small leakage events, such as at customer stop-taps, and responding to this required a change of approach. Leakage levels significantly increased in March due to initial cold and snowy weather conditions in the first couple of days of the month, which had an impact on response times and burst mains, followed by a rapid thaw period, which had a significant impact on the outbreak of burst mains in a relatively short period. However the combination of targeted investment in our network, improved monitoring and control, and our proactive approach to leakage reduction initiatives, such as pressure management, continues to see us actively working to reduce leakage levels further.

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 leakage performance is 49.6 Ml/day. As this is a higher number than the actual leakage level, we have committed to calculating financial incentives on this measure of leakage.

During 2017-18 properties and population numbers have continued to increase at a steady rate (1% p.a.). At 4,912, household new property connections have been at their highest rate for the last 7 years (an average annual rise of 13%). Meter optants, which is when a customer requests the installation of a meter, have dropped by 14% on last year (5,263 in 2016/17 and 4,551 in 2017/18), despite targeted initiatives to promote domestic metering, such as our ‘Beat the Bill’ campaign. Selective metering, on change of occupier, has shown a dramatic increase on the previous year of 175% (from 3,712 to 10,202) and reflects escalation of our efforts to meet its meter penetration commitments for the period.

We have also set up a dedicated project “Meter 66” to provide the increased focus that delivering our challenging metering target for the next two years requires. This team will continue the work we have already done to improve our metering processes, as we now work towards installing over 70,000 meters to meet our March 2020 target of 65.9%.

It is unlikely that customers will experience water pressure below the minimum standard. There were a total of 94 properties identified as receiving low pressure last year. We have successfully reduced this number to 65, which is below our target for this year.

We received 2,300 contacts in 2017-18, which is a significant improvement on the number of complaints (3,096) we received last year. We increasingly use new contact channels as customer expectations are shaped by new technology, whilst still providing a great service for those who want to contact us through traditional routes. We plan to reduce complaints further by meeting individual customer needs first time, and provide a great experience however they get in touch.

We received 1,711 negative water quality contacts during 2017, which is better than our target of 2,322. There has been a reducing trend in the number of contacts we have received over the last few years.

Our performance has benefitted from our trunk mains relining/ replacement programme, which started in 2015, and the associated systematic flushing of the distribution mains supplied from these trunk mains. The renovation of the trunk mains reduced the amount of corrosion debris seeding our network and the associated systematic flushing programme has removed historic corrosion debris, both of which cause discoloured water. Consequently, we are getting a cleaner network and a much-reduced risk of discoloured water contacts when there is any disturbance to water flows caused by burst mains.

As a result of our work we are proud to report that 0% of our customers are in water poverty. By using the results of this measure, we have been able to offer advice, assistance schemes and capped tariffs, known as ‘social tariffs’ (including our Assist tariff, WaterSure Plus and Pension credit tariff) to customers who fall within this category.

We want to help customers to reduce water consumption, through supportive and voluntary measures. However, we recognise that we have to do more to help customers reduce water consumption in line with our long-term ambition to reach 110 litres per person per day by 2045.

In order to improve on our performance, our household customers receive a seasonal newsletter called Watertalk that offers advice to help reduce water consumption as well as money saving tips. In addition, we also have water saving kits available on request. We have also installed free water fountains in the centre of Bristol and offered a ‘water bar’ at local festivals and events, to help promote the benefits of water. Despite these initiatives, we have missed our target for this year.

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 144.5 litres per person per day.

The Southern Resilience Scheme is a £27 million water infrastructure project that provides improved security of supply to over 280,000 customers across our supply area, including Weston-super-Mare, Cheddar, Burnham and Glastonbury and the southern part of Bristol. We have reduced the number of consumers in population centres of over 25,000 people at risk from 288,589 to 9,063, by undertaking this major scheme to construct 30 kilometres of new mains to reinforce and support our southern supply area.

This new network gives us increased flexibility and will allow us to move water from our northern sources into our southern region in the event of a loss of supply, or water back up to Bristol if we lose our northern supply. Put simply, the Scheme means if there is an emergency we can get you back in water much, much quicker.

We have been working with local landholders and farmers to identify where these raw water quality issues can be addressed and through our partnership programmes with key stakeholders, such as the Mendip Lakes Partnership, we are able to work together on these issues. The partners involved include Natural England, the Environment Agency, Wessex Water, Avon Wildlife Trust, Farming & Wildlife Advisory Group and Catchment Sensitive Farming. We are continuing to hold a range of successful farm engagement and training sessions with landholders in the key catchment areas. We monitor the quality of water in the Mendip reservoirs and this monitoring has indicated that our catchment management programme is having a progressive beneficial effect on water quality, with a gradual reduction in the level of algal blooms experienced in these water sources.

Our performance is below the level where we would have expected to be when we started the year as four incidents (Sea Mills burst, Willsbridge burst, Clevedon boil notice and the freeze/thaw related supply interruption incidents at the end of the year) have impacted significantly on this measure. We have worked throughout the year on a number of projects to drive improvement for the 2017/18 results but the impact was not enough to mitigate the effects of incidents.

A selection of the improvements that we introduced during 2017/18 to improve customer satisfaction included a bill redesign, real time feedback, ‘Live Chat’ and the increased use of social media, with over 400,000 customers reached through Facebook during the Clevedon boil notice and a new customer charter across Bristol Water and our network sub-contractors.

Our performance has been adversely affected by a number of exceptional incidents that took place over the last 12 months; in particular the Willsbridge burst in May 2017 caused an interruption to 35,000 customers and added 54.74 minutes to our performance figure. Other significant interruptions occurred at Sea Mills, Withywood (1.38 mins) and Meare (0.89 mins). In addition, this year we encountered water supply issues during the freeze and thaw surrounding the ‘Beast from the East’ severe weather in March.

This continues to be a challenging target for the Company to achieve, as the factors that influence this performance commitment are largely outside of our control.

One key measure of our environmental impact is our carbon emissions. We use almost 80 million kilowatt hours of electrical energy to treat and distribute water. This accounts for almost 90% of our total carbon footprint. We can play our part in reducing the carbon emissions associated with energy use by improved pumping efficiency; reducing leakage and helping our customers use water more efficiently. This, together with improved energy efficiency of our buildings and vehicle fleet, and development of renewable energy sources, enables us to manage those aspects of our carbon footprint that we can control.

We have a long track record of achieving zero turbidity events and for 2017/18 we have again met our target, which means we have again been successful in ensuring consistently good treated water enters our supply system.

Despite having below average customer water bills compared to the rest of the industry, our performance for this year has declined from last year’s reported performance.

The measures we are taking to improve overall affordability across our entire customer base involve:

• Finding efficiencies by improving our digital offering and leveraging new technologies to reduce our cost to serve
• Continuing to refine our processes for bad debt reduction
• Helping customers find ways to reduce their own bills through reducing their consumption

Although we failed to meet our target for this year, over 98% of the samples we took were fully compliant with the discharge consent conditions. This shows a good level of improvement compared to the performance during 2016/17.

Our Solutions Engineering Team are looking at the reasons for the small number of failures we’ve had this year with a view of implementing remedial measures to drive our compliance figure higher.