Water is a valuable natural capital asset and at the heart of our business. We strive to improve our own internal water efficiency in addition to promoting sustainable water usage to our customers, stakeholders and members of the public.
Building water resources and improving water quality is one of our four strategic priorities for 2025-2030. We are regulated for the environmental and efficient management of these activities with our performance reported annually to the regulators including through our regulated businesses Annual Performance Reports.
Water policy and targets
We have developed a Group-wide Water Management Policy, with the aim of reducing our own water footprint, enabling us to lead by example in water stewardship. The policy sets out to optimise water efficiency by encouraging employees to demonstrate best practice water-saving behaviours and to ensure that facilities are in place to monitor water consumption, reduce leakages, and enable employees to most efficiently use water. We are also investigating how we can further reduce and recycle water usage where possible throughout our operations.
Our capital investment of £3.2 billion across the regions we serve includes our base maintenance programme alongside an extensive enhancement programme, focused on delivering against our four priorities. These plans include:
- Upgrading one third of the water treatment works across our regions
- Renewing or replacing c.440km of water mains across our regions
- Lead pipes replacement for 38,000 customers, targeting 170 nurseries, schools and colleges in the SES region
- New strategic reservoir with Cheddar 2 in Bristol and a water re-use plant in Poole
- Reducing leakage by 19% in the South West region, and 14% in the Bristol and SES regions
Pennon Group is committed to reducing our own water consumption and assist our customers to reduce theirs too.
As a group:
- We conduct Water Audits in people’s houses to identify inefficiencies in their houses, fix leaky toilets and other internal water losses.
- We offer customers Leakbots which can help customers identify internal leaks and get these rectified.
- We continued to offer free water savings devices through our website and using the GetWaterFit platform.
- We conduct Water Efficiency Audits in non-households too, with leaks located and repaired.
- We give incentives to retailers to conduct water efficiency schemes with their customers.
- We have a Water Efficiency Fund of £75,000 where we invite charities and communities to apply for funding where their projects can save water use.
- We educate our young people and communities on the need to be more efficient with water use. This year we have engaged with over 13,250 children at various schools across our regions.
- Own-use water efficiency savings across the group have successfully reduced water use by over 13Ml/day across operational sites.
You can find more information on our personal water efficiency initiatives across each of our water businesses websites.
Water use monitoring and measurement
The vast majority of water extracted from the environment is for our customers which we define as indirect use. However, to operate the water network and assets, we use water for cleaning and flushing and additionally consume water within our own offices and facilities.
Our water use data can be found within the Water section of our ESG Databook.
Water stress
Water stress refers to the ability or lack of, to meet the human and ecological demand for water (GRI 20181). The ratio of total annual water withdrawal to total available annual renewable water supply (i.e., baseline water stress) is high (40-80%) or extremely high (>80%) (WRI2). According to this definition, none of our abstraction/withdrawal operations operate in water catchments of water stress within South West or Bristol Water. Several of our abstractions are within an area of high water stress within SES Water.
1GRI 303: WATER AND EFFLUENTS 2018 https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/
2World Resources Institute, Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, www.wri.org/our-work/project/aqueduct/