At Northumbrian Water, protecting the environment is so important to everything we do.
We know our customers care deeply about the health of our rivers and coast, and we share that commitment. Our teams live and work within the region and understand how important our waterways are to all who live in the North East.
Our latest Environment Agency Environmental Performance Assessment has rated us as a two-star company. We recognise that there are areas of our environmental performance where we need to do better, and we are investing almost £2 billion in the North East to improve the environment.
We have carefully reviewed every pollution incident to understand what happened and what we need to do differently - and we are now taking targeted action to address those causes, strengthen the resilience of our networks and reduce the risk of incidents happening again.
As part of our work to make our rivers and coastlines the best they can be, we are investing £1.7 billion between 2025 and 2030 in environmental improvements.
That investment includes improving the resilience of our wastewater infrastructure.
As you can see in the table below, our pollution incidents increased in 2025. Power interruptions accounted for 18% of these incidents, so we are investing millions in measures including back-up generators, mobile generation and battery-powered solutions.
We are also increasing preventative maintenance, including additional maintenance on 21km of sewers close to watercourses, alongside more intensive inspection and cleaning at 40 higher-risk wastewater sites.
We have 239 storm overflow sites in planning, design or construction, which will provide 220,000 cubic metres of additional storage volume – the equivalent of about 88 Olympic swimming pools – which will have a big impact on avoiding spills.
This builds on the significant investment already being made in our wastewater network.
Alongside investment in our physical infrastructure, we are using new technology to help us make the network work smarter.
Our £25 million Smart Sewers programme uses artificial intelligence, weather forecasting and live monitoring to help identify problems and manage the network more effectively. During 2025/26, Smart Sewers helped prevent 42 storm overflow spills and approximately 233,000 cubic metres of spill volume.
Finding new innovative ways to protect the environment is part of our commitment to look beyond traditional solutions to improve.
We know storm overflows are an important issue for our customers and communities and that we need to continue reducing their use.
Transparency is an important part of improving environmental performance.
The Environment Agency's assessment recognised our strong performance for self-reporting pollution incidents, with the vast majority of incidents identified and reported by our own teams.
Our focus now is on turning the investment and action we are taking into sustained improvements, and our priority is to reduce pollution to deliver lasting improvements for the rivers, coast and communities we serve.
