This is a summary of our Annual Performance Report. It tells you what we have achieved in the past year and how we measure our performance.
You can read the full report here.
We make a number of commitments, or promises, to you, our customers.
The ones you might expect relate to our essential services: that we will provide a reliable and sufficient supply of clean, clear drinking water that tastes good; and that we provide an effective sewerage service (Northumbrian Water region only).
We also promise to deliver certain other things in areas including the environment, customer service, communities, competitiveness and our people.
How we measure performance
Everything we do is driven by an Outcome for customers.
We have 12 delivery Outcomes, focused on achieving what our customers tell us they value in the long-term in relation to the environment, customer service and competitiveness. We measure performance against these using Measures of Success (MoS).
For each MoS, we must, as a minimum, deliver a stable level of service to our customers. These are known as our Performance Commitments (PCs).
We can earn a financial reward if we deliver better service. Poor service means we could incur a financial penalty. Some of our measures of success are reputational and do not incur financial rewards or penalties.
We also have seven enabling Outcomes that focus on our communities, our reputation and our people, which we track progress against.
How to find out more
This section of our website explains our performance during the regulatory year ending 31 March 2020.
This is the fifth and final year of us delivering our 2015-20 Business Plan. You will also find details of how our Outcomes are being refreshed for 2020-25 and how we will measure future performance.
Further information about our performance is available on our websites at www.nwl.co.uk, www.eswater.co.uk and www.welivewater.co.uk. For information about how we are performing in comparison to other water and sewerage companies visit www.discoverwater.co.uk.
Our highlights
We are pleased to have achieved or beaten 19 out of our 26 performance commitments in 2019/20. In particular:
- Our customers continue to be satisfied with the services we provide, and in the round they consider those services to be good value for money.
- We have achieved our leakage target in both our operating areas, for the second year in a row, and have significantly decreased the number of water mains bursts.
- We were disappointed not to achieve our drinking water quality Performance Commitment but are confident that we can make improvements to achieve the new Compliance Risk Index measure in the future.
- We are pleased that our sewer flooding performance continues to compare very favourably to our commitments, and is improving.
- Our taste & odour and interruptions to supply performance has also improved since 2018/19, with the former achieving its target for 2019/20, and the latter only narrowly missing it. Both aspects of performance continue to compare favourably to the rest of the industry.
- We continue to be delighted with our industry leading performance on pollution.
Find more detail on each aspect of our performance here.