Our People

We have a series of policies to promote best practice. These are reviewed annually and where necessary are approved by the Board. All of our policies can be found here.

An extensive review and refresh of the Group’s Code of Conduct and associated policies was approved by the Board in February 2025.

We have a comprehensive programme of training and engagement which runs throughout the year. The programme has been designed with the Group’s key compliance and principal risks in mind to increase resilience, heighten awareness and embed our culture of doing the right thing. The training consists of a number of online modules relating to our key policies and procedures including: The Pennon Code of Conduct, Regulatory and Compliance, Whistleblowing Speak Up, Gifts and Hospitality, Anti-Corruption and Bribery, Anti-Facilitation of Tax Evasion, Anti-Modern Slavery & Human Rights and Conflicts of Interest.

Diversity and inclusion

Our sustainability strategy and people strategy encompass our vision to increase diversity in our workforce and to build a culture of inclusiveness across Pennon Group. We monitor and report the Board’s approach to diversity and diversity data and information in our Annual Report and Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap Report. The Pennon Sustainability Committee review the business’s diversity and inclusion performance annually. The Pennon Board, and Adele Barker, our Group Chief People Officer are responsible for diversity initiatives within the business. The Board diversity policy can be viewed here.

Pennon Group is a leader in promoting gender diversity at the highest levels. The Group's Board composition exceeds diversity targets, With 57% female representation as of 31st March 2025. Pennon ranked 27^th for the FTSE 250 best performers in the FTSE Women Leaders Review, surpassing a 40% target for Women on Boards. Building a diverse and engaged workforce is central to Pennon's success. The Group's exceptional gender diversity at the Board level and industry recognition demonstrate its commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace culture and promoting equal opportunities. We are also the first water company to become a signatory of the Change the Race Ratio, helping society to advance ethnic diversity at all levels, and from all backgrounds.

Download our Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap Report:

https://www.pennon-group.co.uk/about-us/gender-and-ethnicity-pay-gap-report

Read Our Change the Race Ratio Commitments here.

Targeted recruitment

Pennon Group is actively promoting diversity and inclusion in its recruitment efforts. The Group has recruited a diverse cohort of graduates since 2021, with our 2024/25 REACH recruitment figure exceeding our target for attracting diverse talent to apply for roles. Pennon continues enhancing its careers website and creative recruitment campaigns while forging new partnerships to drive its diversity and inclusion agenda. The Group celebrated milestones like signing the Armed Forces Covenant and becoming a Disability Confident Employer.

Pennon regularly evaluates its approach, using tools to mitigate bias in job advertisements and ensuring brand imagery represents the communities it serves. Targeted recruitment schemes align with local population data to attract a diverse workforce. The Group is seeing a significant increase in applications from ethnically diverse candidates and women, traditionally underrepresented in the industry.

Overall, Pennon Group is implementing various initiatives to foster a more diverse, inclusive, and representative workforce through its recruitment practices.

Our targeted recruitment schemes also aim to attract a diverse workforce and are aligned to local and regional population data from government statistics. We monitor diversity in all applications and new hires, as well as ensuring that our job advertising uses gender neutral wording, so we don’t discourage female talent from applying. This information is submitted to the Board and Executive Committee on a quarterly basis.

Accessibility Audit

In 2022, we carried out access audits across our head office in partnership with EMBED who have supported us on our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion journey. Ensuring our sites are inclusive is important as they represent the collective services and practices which customers, colleagues and potential talent identify and engage with. We are now working with EMBED following the outcome of the audit to create an action plan to further improve our locations and facilities. We have recently installed a multi-faith prayer room in our Peninsula House office.

Initiatives

Below are examples of some of our diversity initiatives that go beyond legal compliance and support a diverse workforce;

• Diversity and Inclusion Steering Group – The aim of this group is to lead and drive our approach to Diversity and Inclusion and ultimately support the growth of a more diverse business through delivery of our targets across Pennon Group. The group meets quarterly and focuses on our diversity and inclusion strategy, priorities, targets, networking and developing external relationships with Diversity and Inclusion partners and professional bodies.
• Launched our new employee networks – Employee networks play a key role in encouraging and supporting employees in bringing the best version of themselves to work, contributing to an inclusive environment and building a sense of community. Our employee networks include communities on: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage, LGBTQ+, Women, Menopause, Grief, Financial Wellbeing, New Parents, Carers and New Starters.
• Apprenticeship and Graduate Management Trainee programmes – Our industry is predominantly male and our focus on targeted recruitment of graduates and apprentices has led to a high female recruitment rate, which is higher than our business wide targets.
• Energy and Utilities Skills Partnership – Pennon is a member of this partnership which aims to ensure a safe, skilled, diverse and sustainable workforce in the sector.
• Supply Chain Sustainability School - We are now a partner of the Supply Chain Sustainability School (SCSS), reinforcing our commitment to upskilling our supply chain and colleagues across key sustainability topics
• 10,000 black interns – Pennon Group is a proud supporter and sponsoring business of the 10,000 Black Interns initiative. This important scheme provides Black students opportunities to understand the business while improving ethnic diversity levels across the industry.
• Social Mobility We continue to be a proud signatory of the Social Mobility Pledge and have set further commitments across the Group during this year to strengthen our resolve to deliver for our customers and communities, and support the drive to address social injustice. To this end, we have become a tier 1 funder of the registered charity Social Mobility Business Partnership, and launched work experience clusters in Exeter and Bristol, with Plymouth added this year.
• Mentorship programmes:
  • Female mentorship programme - Pennon offer female mentorship programmes for middle and senior managers aimed at helping to develop a broader pipeline of women and balance the gender diversity pyramid at all levels of the business. This contributes to the 30% club of which Pennon are members.
  • Graduate Management Trainee mentorship programme – All our graduate management trainees have been offered a mentor within the business.
  • All our graduate management trainees have been offered a mentor within the business.

At the heart of any great business are the people who work in it. Our people strategy is centred around talented people doing great things for customers and each other.

We want to be the best place to work for our employees and we value the expertise, dedication, adaptability, flexibility and commitment of everyone who works with us as one amazing team.

Pennon is pleased to be a Living Wage Foundation employer and is committed to exceeding the government national minimum / living wage pay rates and paying employees appropriately for their high-quality work and service to customers.

We have a strong commitment to invest in the development of our employees and to build and recognise talent across the Group. Training and development are available for employees at all levels within the Group and all are actively encouraged to participate. Our aim is to increase productivity, job satisfaction and safety, and to equip the next generation of leaders and employees with appropriate knowledge, skills and the competencies they need to thrive.

As a business we joined the 5% Club, an organisation with over 1,000 members that aims to address the issue of poverty arising from high youth unemployment and a shortage of the right skills for the workplace of today and tomorrow. We are delighted to be the only water company that has been awarded Platinum Membership status of the 5% Club as we have around 10% of our employees undertaking apprenticeships or on a formal structured graduate programme.

Pennon Group is heavily investing in developing young talent through apprenticeships, graduate programs, and work placements. The Group has doubled its commitment in this area, setting targets to support 1,000 apprentices, 200 graduates, and offer 5,000 work placements for young people by 2030. Achieving Platinum status demonstrates our long-term commitment to investing in structured apprenticeship and graduate programmes for our employees.

Read more information on our Employee metrics in our ESG Databook

The health, safety and wellbeing of our employees is paramount. At Pennon, we believe everyone who works for us and with us should go home safe to their families and loved ones every day, and this has never had more resonance than in the current climate. We worked hard to support employees physically and emotionally during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and have continued to evolve how we can improve both the physical and emotional health of all of our people.

Our Pennon Code of Conduct ensures all employees have the same understanding of what is expected in the workplace. It is fully aligned to HomeSafe, our health and safety programme, to ensure employees get to work safely, enjoy a safe and healthy working environment and arrive home without incident at the end of the working day.

HomeSafe

Ensuring our people go home safe to their families safely every day is an utmost priority. Our HomeSafe programme continues to focus on the three key areas of Visible Safety Leadership, Accountability and Data Driven Targeted Interventions. Relentless focus on and driving consistency in these areas has seen the Group’s Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (employees and agency, excluding contractors), the Group’s primary measure of health and safety performance, continue to reduce, and this year achieve the original HomeSafe strategic target of 0.25. This year has seen the fourth year in a row of reduction in LTIFR, down to 0.22 in September 2024, and 0.24 at 31 March 2025, compared to 0.30 at 31 March 2024.

The three areas we focused on:

Visible Safety Leadership:

• The third year of HomeSafe Live events

- Six conferences across Devon, Cornwall, Bournemouth and Bristol, sponsored by the Senior Management Team from all departments. Over 1,000 employees attended fun, engaging sessions focused on the “Mind Safety” principles connecting day to day behaviours to safety outcomes.

- Leaders owning HomeSafe, celebrating success with the intention of encouraging others to develop good practice and behaviours.

- Leaders hosted safety ‘stand-downs’ to discuss recent events and immediate lessons to be adopted.

- An expansion of the successful ‘12 days of Christmas’ campaign into a full 24 day advent calendar where each day for 24 days, a team from across all Group companies and supply chain partners owned a key HomeSafe message for the Group ranging from simple pictures and messages through to scripted and acted out videos to engage the audience.

Driving a culture of accountability throughout the organisation:

• Implementing an index HomeSafe scorecard with a 70% performance bias on lead activities, driving up performance against these areas and embedding these behaviours as the ‘way we work’.
• Empowered decision making on risk management and investment into the front line teams to identify hazards and solutions, and deliver these locally at pace to improve the working environment.

Used analytics to target interventions on the key areas at the right time to drive down harm, particularly in manual handling and slips, trips and falls. Additionally, this year we have driven increased focus on our ‘Site Pride’ initiative, encouraging teams across the Group, including Tier 1 and 2 contractors, to meet the minimum standards of their workplaces to achieve a Bronze, Silver or Gold Site Pride award. Through a league table approach we have introduced healthy ‘competition’ between teams to drive up standards in their work environment, instilling local pride and creating and maintaining clean, healthy and safe work environments that will ultimately lead to higher engagement and fewer injuries. 45 individual sites have achieved an award to date with a similar number in flight and due to be assessed in the coming year. As we prepare for AMP8, HomeSafe has also been embedded within Amplify, our engineering partnership between SWW and our supply chain, leveraging the skills, experiences and innovation opportunities from across a wide range of organisations.

While we have delivered year-on-year improvements, we continue to recognise that HomeSafe is not a project that will be completed. It continues to be the way we work and how we deliver on our commitments to customers, communities and the environment. Our roadmap to HomeSafe 2025 has delivered its original objective. HomeSafe is truly embedded within the Group, and to build on this success we have evolved HomeSafe again, focusing on four key cornerstones that will drive continued improvements in Occupational Safety while increasing focus and improvements in health and wellbeing. The plan to 2030 has been developed with significant input from across the whole Group and will see HomeSafe remain at the core of how we deliver for our customers, stakeholders and the environment, expanding the remit to ensure we support our people to be the best version of themselves and that everyone goes home safe every day.

Read more on our Health and Safety metrics, including LTI, LTIFR, training and Wellbeing in our ESG Databook.

Pennon has developed an anti-slavery programme to allow it to understand and mitigate the risk of modern slavery across the group. Please see our updated anti modern slavery and human rights policy. Pennon Group has a zero-tolerance approach to modern slavery and is committed to eradicating it from its operations and supply chain. The Group has implemented policies like the Code of Conduct and Anti-Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy that all partners and suppliers must comply with. It publishes an annual Modern Slavery Statement outlining the activities conducted to prevent modern slavery and has a Suppliers Code of Conduct aligning the supply chain with the Group's standards.

Pennon Group has membership with the Slave-Free Alliance to develop tailored processes and controls to prevent modern slavery, providing external expertise. The Group is rolling out a three-year program to maintain the highest employment standards for direct employees and the supply chain.

Pennon Group relies on internal efforts and external partnerships to monitor, assess, and reduce the risk of forced labour and human trafficking across its business activities and relationships, demonstrating a clear commitment to upholding human rights and ethical employment practices. Our latest Modern Slavery Statement can be found here: www.pennon-group.co.uk/sites/default/files/attachments/pdf/pennon-anti-modern-slavery-and-human-right-policy-v2-1.pdf.

Pennon has maintained its membership of the Slave-Free Alliance, which is part of Hope for Justice, the global anti-slavery charity. Our membership demonstrates our commitment to the highest employment standards for both our direct employees and those within our supply chain.