Bristol Water performance in 2019/20

The increase in the BI score demonstrates how we are delivering mitigation and enhancements on company landholdings. This achievement has been delivered in partnership with Bristol Water Projects, external stakeholders and receiving advice from conservation organisations. Our improvements this year include:

• Coppicing, hedgerow planting, scrub removal for hedgerow maintenance at Chew Valley Lake
• Thinning of woodland copse, removal or fly tipped litter/rubbish, hedgerow planting along fence line with a public footpath at Dry Hill PS

As a result of our long-term pipe management, our performance this year has seen a significant reduction in the number of bursts. Our approach for future years is to continue to develop our risk-based targeted investment approaches 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 performance represents a high level of compliance and is representative of the high quality of water supplied to our customers. Regulatory failures however for 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 meaning we have little influence over these results. A significant number of the failures reported in 2019 were associated with customer domestic plumbing systems. There were no particular themes within the compliance failures.

Improving our customers’ experience is a top priority for us, both when they have a need to contact us and when they do not. We did not meet our target of the 5th placed score from 2018/19. Disruption from a significant burst event and from a major change to our contracting arrangements meant we only achieved a score equivalent to 13th, which was a very disappointing level of performance. Our transformation project significantly improved the performance by the end of the year. Measures include:

• To increase the use of our ‘door-step’ feedback tool, CustomerSure, to gain real-time feedback when our fieldworkers close a customer appointment or job and after email responses. By using this process, we are able to connect with those customers who are dissatisfied with an aspect of our service and correct the issue in a timely manner.
• Our Customer Care Team now attend the sites of major renovations and new connections in order to liaise with customers in their environment and to be able to provide real-time information to the customers who we are directly affecting.

This has continued to be a challenging target to achieve. We have delivered a variety of initiatives over the last year:

• We have piloted using multi-media messaging services to triage customer contact in the operation contact centre to use customer photos and videos to assess the resource required and whether the issue can be resolved through instructions over the telephone.
• We have been upskilling and knowledge sharing between the operations and customer teams. This has involved district inspectors and district managers being based in the operational call centre so that they can provide the call operator with immediate technical knowledge and solutions during a customer enquiry.
• In July 2019 we held customer focus groups with 37 customers to identify how we can improve our service and make it easier to contact us.

We have a long track record of achieving outperformance on this measure. We have however noticed an increase in number of failures in effluent, telemetry and raw water process and a decrease in number of events for ozone and plumbo-solvency. We use the information 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.

It has been 30 years since we last introduced a hosepipe ban (in 1990). We managed our water resources very carefully throughout the dry spells over the last few years, reducing the amount of water we took from the Mendip reservoirs and increasing the amount taken from the River Severn. This resilience allowed us to maintain a low risk of water restrictions, despite very dry and hot summer weather that was experienced.

If a Temporary Use Ban were to be introduced, our customers would be restricted from undertaking a number of activities, such as watering their garden, cleaning their cars or watering their plants using a hosepipe.

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 reduce leakage levels further. As well as the mild weather conditions over the winter, 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 on provide service pipes. We are proud that our strategy and focus on this area of customer priority has resulted in the lowest leakage levels ever reported for Bristol Water.

Our actual level of leakage has reduced by 11% since 2018/19 and is 13% lower than the target. It reflects a c.16% reduction since 2014. Our plans expect to build on this further with a 6.5Ml/d reduction over 2020-25.

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 40.9 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.

On average customers who switch to a meter save £100 per year on their water bill. However in comparison to other areas in England and Wales, Bristol Water customers are not in a ‘serious water stressed’ area.

We will continue to install meters in domestic properties upon change of ownership and when customers request a meter. However, the current economic slowdown caused by Covid-19 is likely to have a detrimental impact upon the number of people moving house. Covid-19 has also delayed our ability to install meters temporarily. We provided customers with a lower assessed charge instead and will return to fit meters as circumstances allow.

In recognition of the slowdown in the property market in our supply area, we know that we must also transform our promotion of water meters in order to ensure that customers are attracted to this opportunity. We have designed an extensive marketing programme, including work with Aardman Animations, to help increase metering uptake, such as our "Peter the Meter" character. Customers may find out more information on applying for a water meter and on the products available on our website.

We are pleased to report that the number of properties on the risk register has continued to reduce since 2016/17, despite locating and adding new properties to the register this year. This net reduction is a result of following:

• We continued to undertake supply route checks, which confirmed that a number of properties initially thought to be on a shared supply now have their own supply pipe. This was the case for seven properties in Radstock.
• Another three properties were added to the register as a result of investigating poor pressure complaints from our customers (one property in Alveston, one in Midsommer Norton and another in Frome).

The continued decrease in negative billing contacts is partly as a result of our ’10 a week’ programme, which was put in place to clear down open jobs, which resulted in a reduction of customers chasing us for a resolution of an issue. This programme involves receiving a list of all of our unclosed jobs from Pelican (our joint-billing company with Wessex Water), with each area manager designated ten of these jobs to investigate and close. We also attribute our outperformance based on our focus on our updates to our website, improving the online self-service options and the updates we have made to the presentation of our bills.

Over the last five years we have seen a significant reduction in the number of contacts about the appearance, taste and/or odour of water from our customers.

Customer contacts for the appearance of their drinking water remains the greatest proportion of our overall contacts (these account for 73% of the total customer contacts). Despite significant activity on the network, including an ambitious mains renovation programme, the final number has resulted in a 34% reduction in the number of negative water quality contacts since the start of the reporting period. We have achieved these results 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.

We offer three discounted tariffs to make sure we can help customers who find it hard to pay their water charges, with 19,207 customers receiving assistance through these measures, an increase of 21% over last year.

• 8,202 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
• 2,974 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
• 7,833 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.

In addition to the social tariff schemes, 2,900 households are currently benefitting from our ‘Restart’ scheme to clear their debt combined with our ‘Assist’ tariff, which reduces bills to an affordable level and helps customers who are in financial difficulty to get back on track with their water bill.

This is a challenging target and regretfully we have not achieved our ambitions again this year. 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. Covid-19 also increased domestic water consumption as people were in lock down at home rather than at work or elsewhere. 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, and we aim to work with neighbouring water companies through the West Country Water Resources group on water efficiency promotion.

We know from continuous engagement activities that our customers on the whole do not wish to see full compulsory metering introduced and we do not have plans to introduce such a programme. This impacts our PCC performance. 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.

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 144.6 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.

Our performance means that water in the reservoirs 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 (known as Sites of Specific Scientific Interest and Special Protection Areas).

Although we have missed our target, our customer satisfaction rate is higher than our average performance over the previous 4 years. In addition, our customer satisfaction rate is the result of 0.5% of customers rating our service as “fairly poor” and “very poor”. However, the number of customers responding with “don’t know” and “neither good nor poor” has increased on last year’s survey. A total of 874 out of 1,000 customers said our service is excellent, very good or good and their top reasons for this included “never had any problem with Bristol Water” (37%), “water quality is good” (26%), and “reliable/consistent water supply” (24%).

Our performance has resulted in a 19% decrease since our assumed starting position in 2014/15, which has meant customers have seen their average supply interruptions decrease considerably.

We have invested in our smart network capabilities and increased the coverage of pressure loggers from which our staff have developed tools that have transformed the way we analyse and record supply interruptions. We have developed disciplines around Continuous Water Supplies (CWS), introduced 24-hour operations room support. The repairs teams have meanwhile have undergone a culture-change to first focus on supporting our customers by prioritising maintaining and restoring supplies (via rezones, infusion tankering, on-demand bowsers, over-land temporary mains and re-usable lay-flat mains) and secondly focusing on repairing the asset (fixing the burst). Previously fixing the burst was the top priority.

In common with many other sectors the majority of our emissions are associated with grid electricity use; grid electricity consumption is mainly related to pumping water through treatment processes, or to supply it to our customers. Our performance is predominantly driven by the change in the national grid electrify factor used to compute emissions.

In addition, a whole network automated pump scheduling and optimisation system to reduce the amount of energy we use to produce and move water to our customers is also being implemented.

The momentum behind climate change action has grown significantly in the past two years. Bristol City Council has been leading in its response and was the first city to declare a climate emergency (in 2018) and more recently an ecological emergency (February 2020). Through its One City Plan and most recently, its climate strategy, Bristol has committed to be carbon neutral by 2030. Bristol Water is supporting this ambition through the Bristol One City Plan Environmental Sustainability Board. and we have also publicly endorsed Bristol’s Climate Strategy and response to the ecological emergency.

The aim of this metric is to reduce the turbidity experienced at our water treatment works, which if successful contributes to improvements in the appearance of drinking water and effectiveness of the disinfection processes. 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 are pleased to have not only outperformed our target for this year but to have received our highest score over the past five years. As well as below average customer water bills compared to the rest of the industry, one factor which may contribute to a higher score from our customers is our commitment to further reduce the bill of our customers in real terms over the next five years. In addition, we are continually striving to improve the service that we provide to our customers and the communities that we serve through initiatives such as the customer care team and our social contract.

Our performance has been 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). Five of the seven compliance failures recorded have been from this site. Compliance for samples collected at Blagdon has proved challenging, particularly with respect to ammonium, dissolved oxygen, phosphate and suspended solids parameters. We had three category 3 pollution incidents in 2019 and achieved 100% self-reporting to the Environment Agency, ahead of the industry target of 75%.