Our Business Plan 2025–30 is our largest ever at £7.8 billion and marks the final stage in our transformation. It is ambitious and shows how we will enhance the health and wellbeing of our communities, protect and improve the environment and help to sustain the local economy.
We will work differently, using new technology and nature-based solutions to go further, faster to tackle the challenges of water scarcity, water quality, pollutions and flooding, delivering a step change in our environmental performance, building new assets and securing supplies for the future.
It focuses on what customers have told us is most important to them:
- A reliable supply of water
- Healthy rivers and seas
- Trusted and easy customer service
Our customers and communities
We supply essential wastewater services to 4.7 million customers and water to 2.6 million customers across dozens of diverse communities.
Our region is home to major towns and cities, more than 700 miles of coastline and hundreds of environmentally significant sites. It also has some of the world’s most iconic chalk streams – rare habitats for a diverse range of species and a crucial source of our drinking water.
- 57 of 84
- Bathing waters achieved excellent status
- 26
- Of which are in our region
- 5
- Areas of outstanding natural beauty
- 350+
- Sites of Specific Scientific Interest
- 2
- UNESCO World Heritage biosphere reserves
- 38
- Special areas of conservation
- 17
- Special protection areas
- 2
- National parks
- 13
- Ramsar sites*
- 3,400km
- of rivers
- 1
- Heritage coast
- 15
- marine conservation zones
*These are wetland areas protected under the UNESCO Ramsar Convention, 1971
The trends we see
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Population growth…
will place more pressure on limited resources.
- UK population grown by 8.7 million people in 20 years.
- By 2050, the population in the South East will have grown by 19-25%.
- Increased urbanisation will require new water solutions.
- Greater demand for agricultural production.
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Changing communities…
demographic and societal changes will change how we need to deliver our services.
- People are focused on health and wellbeing.
- More people are living alone.
- The average age of the population is rising.
- Increasing mobility as more households move each year.
- Hybrid working changes for local services.
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Evolving customer expectations…
in terms of access to technology and information.
- Speed of service from other sectors.
- Demand for real-time data that improves lifestyle and finances.
- 24/7 availability of services with low tolerance of failure.
- A desire for personalised services.
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Increasing technology…
Big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
- Unlock insights from data.
- Access to open data.
- Automation to simplify and speed up processes.
- AI that adapts to changing environments.
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Rising environmental concern…
driving rapid change in government priorities.
- Social media exposes environmental harm.
- Pollutions seen as unacceptable.
- Rare and fragile chalk streams under threat.
- Use of storm overflows seen as unacceptable.
- Open-water swimming increasing in popularity.
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Climate change…
changing the way we operate our water and wastewater services.
- Need to reduce emissions.
- More extreme weather, warmer land, air and sea, polar ice melting, changes in ocean currents.
- Seasonal storms increasing in intensity and hyper-locality.
- Biodiversity reducing.
The challenges we face
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Water scarcity
Our region is already water-stressed and will become more so. In Hampshire we need to reduce the amount we take from the iconic Test and Itchen chalk streams.
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Population growth
We expect our region’s population to grow by up to 25% by 2050; with more than 800,000 new homes connected to our wastewater networks by 2050. Demand for water will also increase.
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Climate change
Climate change is also increasing the demand for water. 2022 was the warmest year on record. Droughts will become more severe and frequent in the future. Increasing temperatures can also impact water quality and more intense storms can cause pollution and power failures.
What our customers have told us
Over 25,000 customers spent more than 8,000 hours telling us what they think of our plan.
Combining this with other sources gave us over 10 million data points – which is greater breadth and depth of insight than ever before.
Read more about customer acceptabilityCustomers are clear on their highest priorities for what we need to do:
- continue providing clean, wholesome, safe drinking water now and into the future;
- reduce pollutions and our use of storm overflows, as customers do not see the distinction between them;
- reduce flooding;
- make sure customers in vulnerable circumstances are protected from bill increases, particularly while the cost of living remains high; and
- reduce leakage. It’s seen as wasteful and unacceptable.
Our customers and communities have also been clear about how we should do things. We should:
- protect and improve our environment by putting nature first;
- address the root causes of issues and resolve them for the long-term – this includes using nature-based solutions wherever we can to deliver lasting environmental benefits;
- focus on delivering fewer things and delivering them well – because they want to see tangible results in key areas;
- show leadership and demonstrate we are doing everything we can – making it easier for customers to play their part;
- do things differently – working with others and adopting new technologies and ways of working at pace; and
- understand our communities better, deliver good service and improve our response when things go wrong – helping rebuild their trust in us.
We’re already doing things differently
Our Turnaround Plan is delivering a rapid step change in our performance to get us ready to deliver our Business Plan 2025–30.
We know our performance is not yet good enough, and we have a Turnaround Plan which will deliver a short sharp ambitious improvement by 2025, particularly in terms of our environmental performance.
It includes four clear outcomes that we’re promising to deliver, improving our service to customers and protecting and improving the environment, including: a reliable supply of water for our customers; healthy rivers and seas; trusted and easy customer service; and empowered and supported colleagues.
We’ve already made huge changes to our business, improving transparency and embedding a new culture centred around a Code of Ethics that is driving our day-to-day decision-making. No external dividends have been paid since 2017. Our new shareholders have also invested significantly in the company, helping us to accelerate our plans.
We’ll be reporting on progress to our customers and our regulators every six months through to 2025.
Read more about our turnaround plan- 24,000
- sewer monitors fitted across our network reporting in real-time to central Control Centre
- 6
- Pathfinder projects delivering storm overflow reductions – by up to 70% in some areas
- More than 500
- leaks fixed every week, found using acoustic loggers and satellite technology
- 10%
- customers on our Priority Services Register, offering customers support when they need it most
- 60%
- water call-out queries answered via video triage service
Our new Business Plan 2025–30
Our plan for 2025–30 and beyond will continue to build on the improvements we’ve already made in our performance. Our customers and stakeholders have helped us to create this plan, which sees a significant increase in investment over the next five years. It will deliver major improvements in water supply resilience, in the way we treat wastewater and to customer service. It will produce significant improvements to the environment in our region, with its unique combination of coastline, bathing waters, chalk streams and diverse habitats.
Our engagement with customers has shown support, which we must continue to earn, for the scale and ambition of our plans. These plans will mean significant bill increases. Water bills have been comparatively low compared with many other utilities, but we know that increases will be hard at a time when the cost of living continues to rise. That's why we have spread these increases over the five years to 2030 and are extending our social tariff to nearly twice as many customers. We also plan to increase our Hardship Fund and extend our Priority Services Register to support our customers.
The issues we are tackling are long term and go beyond this five-year plan. We have looked out to 25 years and developed plans to respond to changes. We know there will be major challenges in delivering the plan, but we know that it is right for our environment, for our communities, for our company, for our investors, and above all for our customers.
The plan has now been submitted to Ofwat for its consideration and approval. We’ll get a response from them in the form of a Draft Determination in May/June 2024, which will highlight any areas of the plan that they believe need to be revisited. We’ll then be able to respond with further evidence or updates. Ofwat will then issue a Final Determination in December 2024, which will include its final view on bills and charges that we can either accept or appeal via the Competition and Markets Authority.
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A reliable supply of high-quality water to our customers
We face severe water shortages over the short and long term and must act now to address the issues. We will plan alongside our neighbouring water companies in the South-East, upgrade our supply works and invest in new sources, like water recycling plants and a new reservoir. We will innovate to reduce leakage on our network and reduce the amount of water we take from the environment.
Read more about wholesale water -
Healthy rivers and seas
Our customers have asked us to protect and improve our environment, focusing on our rivers and seas. We will use nature-based solutions where we can alongside new technology, to reduce our use of storm overflows, upgrade of our pumping stations to further reduce pollutions and bursts and upgrade our treatment works to improve river water quality.
Read more about wholesale wastewater -
Trusted and easy customer service
We want to support our customers with easy service and transparent communications that show we care for our communities. This means spending time with our customers to understand their needs and tailoring our services where we can. We will improve how we respond if things go wrong, play a bigger role in their communities by increasing our outreach and education programmes and work closely with developers and our non-household retailers to improve their services.
Read more about customer service -
Customer bills and potential increases explained
We need to significantly increase how much we invest to transform our services and improve our environment to meet the growing challenges of water scarcity, climate change impacts and population growth. By the end of 2030 our bills will need to increase by water (69%) and waste (27%) to pay for this. This means a 44% increase between 2025–30. We know that with cost-of-living increases and wider inflation this will be especially hard for some of our customers, and we have doubled the financial support we offer while also increasing acces to our Hardship Fund and Priority Services.
Read more about customer bills
We’re planning for the long term to 2050
Many of the challenges we face are long term and so we need to make sure we have planned ahead. We have looked out as far as 2050 and have factored in potential population growth, further pressure on our services through climate change, and further restrictions on the amount of water we can take from our rivers.
We have created different scenarios about future demand and developed a set of plans that we can adjust as we go. The key issues are about what we have to build and when, to preserve our environment and water supplies for generations of customers to come.
Inevitably there are lots of uncertainties when we look so far ahead, but the broad trends of increasing demands are clear to see. Our plan for the next five years is in effect the first stage of plans required for a 25-year time horizon.
More detailed investment plans will be set out in future price reviews. In the meantime, we’ll keep talking to our regulators about how we deliver our plans not just for the next five years, but for the longer term.
Read more about our plans for 2025-30