We publish a range of information about our services and performance, including how we are performing against the commitments we’ve made in our business plans.
This helps to assure our customers and stakeholders that we’re delivering what they’ve told us they need and want from Northumbrian Water and Essex & Suffolk Water.
It’s important that we have robust assurance arrangements to make sure this information is accurate, clear, and transparent. This is essential to building and maintaining a high level of trust and confidence with our customers and stakeholders
A significant proportion of this assurance aims to make sure the information we publish in our Annual Performance Report (APR) is of the right quality. This assurance update is published alongside our APR and summarises the outcome of this assurance.
Our Assurance Plan documents
Assurance framework
This assurance framework was applied to our 2020-25 Business Plan and enabled our Board to satisfy itself that the information associated with the development of our Performance Commitments (PCs) was robust.
We apply the same framework to the information needed to report our performance against these commitments.
A critical part of this assurance framework is our approach to risk, which includes the following steps:
- Understanding how data for each measure of success is managed from the point at which it is collected in the field, through the way it is collated to appear on a final report.
- Applying a formal risk assessment to each measure of success. This reviews:
- The likelihood of a reporting error due to the complexity of a performance measure and how the data is collected.
- The impact if an error should occur, particularly on customers’ trust and confidence, financial incentives, and our reputation.
- The effectiveness of our data quality controls (which are rated as good, acceptable, or ineffective) – including those which are procedural, audit based, or built into our IT systems.
