Our performance

What’s gone well during Jan-Jun:
This measure is reported on a calendar year basis. Year-to-date has seen the continuation of relatively high numbers of failures. Investigations found that many of these were private single property issues which do not have a high impact on CRI. Appropriate advice was given to customers, and issues were resolved quickly.

What challenges have we faces during Jan-Jun:
Amongst the failed samples contributing to CRI in April to June, there were three samples for iron. Commonly, iron is found is sediments that accumulate within water mains, and when these get disturbed this can cause discolouration for customers. Despite significant improvement in customer reports of discolouration our rate of iron failure remains a challenge. Mains interventions were carried out to flush out the build up sediments in local systems, and in one case a scheme was create to install new main.

What activities are planned Jul-Sep:
Quarters 3 and 4 are historically known to be the more challenging periods of the year. Higher temperatures can lead to increase detections of bacteria in water samples. We dose chlorine compounds to drinking water to make it safe to drink, and we are continuing oversight of the levels of chlorine in order to balance the right levels of disinfection while also preventing unwanted tastes and odours. Long term processes to install some enhanced monitoring at our water treatment works is ongoing, although this is not expected to provide benefit regionally until 2025.

What’s gone well during Q1:
It has been a very good start to the year with the supply interruptions measure. This is our best start to a year we have seen this AMP period, and are forecasting to go on to deliver our best year too. This brilliant performance so far is down to a number of factors, such as informative stand downs across various departments within the business aimed at driving improvement, better co-operation between different teams reacting to incidents, and the hard work and efforts of many people within the company.

What challenges have we faces during Q1:
We have had a couple of difficult incidents that have had an impact on our performance. However, due to our quick and effective response to these, we have managed to reduce the impact on customers to less than we may have previously done.

What activities are planned Q2:
We still have a lot of work to do, but are spending a lot of time looking at repeat critical factors during incidents, so that we can look at ways of improving the service we give to our customers. We are also carrying out visits to local Field Teams, aimed at informing them of the impacts of their actions during incidents and how they can have a more positive impact on customers.

What’s gone well during Q1:
We finished 2023/2025 ahead of target which puts us in a great position to achieve our 5 year target of a 15% reduction. The first few months of the year have been steady from a leakage position, the network has been calm, helped by the weather, which means we have not had to react to lots of break out bursts. This allows us to proactively look for leaks, finding and fixing those which are not yet impacting customers.

What challenges have we faces during Q1:
Although it’s been a steady quarter, we are marginally adrift from our year to date target but we are optimistic we’ll close this gap over the next quarter. 

What activities are planned Q2: 
Q2 is an important time for leakage, we need to drive down leakage to all time low levels to put us into the best possible position going in to Winter. As we are committed to achieving our 5 year plan, we have just recruited 12 trainee Leakage Inspectors who join us in September, and we continue to optimise our acoustic logger fleet, making sure we can identify leaks on the water network as soon as they occur. We are also looking at new and quicker ways to get leaks on communication and supply pipes fixed with less disruption to our customers. 

What’s gone well during Q1:
We have carried out a number of full flow tests to confirm our Unplanned Outage and have captured the data on these so we have it available for reporting purposes. 

What challenges have we faces during Q1:
A challenge we have faced this year, which we havnt experienced before is accessing some critical parts quick enough to be able to rectify an outage issue. We are working with our suppliers to ensure this challenge doesnt continue.

What activities are planned Q2:
Continued focus with key team internally to maintain and protect performance. We will also carry out a review of the longer and or larger impacting sites to see what we can do proactively to improve levels of performance.

What's gone well during Q1:
Quarter 1 has gone well for Mains Repairs. In previous years we have seen significant weather events which have impacted mains bursts. However this reporting year has been mild so far, which has had a positive effect on our reported numbers.

What challenges have we faced during Q1:
Q1 has been really positive, and the challenge going forward is mainly significant weather changes, this will always be a risk for our network. Mild temperatures during summer and winter months are ideal to reduce significant events. We are however performing well this year, which has given us a buffer in the event of significant weather changes.

What activities are planned for Q2:
Q2 is all about maintaining the strong performance we have seen already this year. A continuation of resources and focus to overcome any challenging weather and temperature changes will be key. 

What’s gone well during Q1:
Our water efficiency home visit program is still ongoing and so far we have conducted circa 850 visits to customers in the Doncaster and Sheffield region and have installed tailored water efficiency devices to help customers save water. We are conducting our summer water saving campaign based on the impact of summer weather patterns, we have commenced some collaboration with community groups across Yorkshire and have conducted some face to face customer engagement including a water efficiency stand at the Great Yorkshire Show. 

What challenges have we faces during Q1:
We have continued to see challenges on the uptake of our water efficiency visits from customers in the trial area but we have seen numbers of request begin to improve as we have expanded the trial area. We saw an increase in consumption in 2022/23 against 2021/22 which was expected as last year was a normal year and we didn’t experience any supply/demand challenges. This increase in consumption has continued at the start of Y5 but with the activities planned this should improve this position. 
                                                                                                                                                                  
What activities are planned Q2:
We are working on business readiness for AMP8 with planning underway to ensure we are ready to deliver water efficiency activities for households from April 2025 in line with the plan we submitted within our WRMP24 and PR24 submissions. In addition to business readiness we will also continue to deliver the trials which we have underway to ensure the benefits from these activities reflect those submitted in our plan.

What’s gone well during Q1: 
We have many new pollution initiatives running to reduce incident rates across all asset bases as we strive to improve our environment for our customers. Further to this we have been engaging with key external stakeholders such as the Rivers Trust and local councils, 60 engagement sessions across the region have been held to date to received feedback on how we can improve and work together to better the environment we live in.

What challenges have we faces during Q1: 
We had our Environmental Performance Assessment confirmed from the previous year which rated us as a 2 star company taking us down from 3 stars from the previous. Whilst this is disappointing and we have numerous plans in place to improve, we ranked joint first for performance on total pollution incidents over 10,000km of sewer. We also led the water sector on discharge permit compliance at 99.7% and shows our commitment to improving the environment. 

What activities are planned Q2:
Restructuring of our sewer networks team to enable an enhanced industry standard response to potential pollution incidents. Continue our engagement work with external stakeholders and customers and building on the 60 engagement sessions we have already held. As we near the end of the current 5 year AMP period, we are focusing on delivering our commitments on pollution and how we cross over into the next AMP period with a new plan to further improve our environmental performance. 

What’s gone well during Q1:
We are currently performing better than last year for year-to-date Internal sewer flooding incidents and are already ahead of plan for some of our sewer flooding initiatives such as the Sewer Maintenance Programme. This programme focuses on hotspot areas for sewer flooding and has allowed us to complete 14,687 surveys, clear 703 blockages and find 1912 defects proactively just in our first quarter of the year. We continue to see positive engagement with our blockages campaign to raise customer awareness and engagement on not flushing unsuitable items such as wipes, sanitary products and Fat, Oils & Grease (FOG). We are seeing lower levels of soft blockages in relation to Internal Sewer Flooding. The Network Protection Team continue to educate and support our customers alongside our blockages campaign to reduce the impact of FOG and unsuitable items in the network. They have been providing advice and expertise to businesses on how to manage what they introduce into the network to avoid blockages, supporting our drive to reduce sewer flooding incidents.

What challenges have we faced during Q1:
Unfortunately, whilst we are performing better than last year, we have had some challenging weather conditions with higher-than-average rainfall. April was the wettest April of the AMP and one of the wettest April’s on record with rainfall 55% above average in Yorkshire. This has contributed to our current ISF performance being adverse to plan for our regulatory target. In recent weeks we have seen a significant recovery for our ISF performance and will continue to overdrive our proactive and preventative work as well as our response times to customer issues.

What activities are planned for Q2:
Internal sewer flooding is a key priority for both us and our customers and we are working hard to remove the risk of sewer flooding and improve our performance. We will continue to overdrive our proactive programmes and preventative measures as well as improve our response times for our customers. We will continue to educate our customers on network abuse through our Network Protection Team as well as promoting our blockages campaign. We're really excited that we're one of the sponsors for the Great Yorkshire Show in July. It offers us an opportunity to engage with over 140,000 visitors across the four days and talk to them about what happens when the wrong things are flushed or poured down the sink, supporting our drive to reduce blockages and sewer flooding incidents.

What’s gone well during Jan-Jun:
This measure is reported as a calendar year and we are on target for achieving the year-end treatment compliance target of >99%. We follow a robust process which aims to prevent repeat failures which impacts the treatment works compliance.

What challenges have we faces during Jan-Jun:
The environmental conditions (wetter than normal) has cause some operational challenges. Howden Sewerage Treatment Works was also classified as Failing in January due to wetting rate on plastic filters, mitigation has been put in place to prevent this form happing. We have had no further failures in Q1&Q2 (calendar year), the early failure increases the risk in failing to meet this performance commitment, although we are still confident of achieving this target.

What activities are planned Jul-Sep:
We will continue with existing escalation and safeguards to ensure the performance commitment is met, and we aim to continue to be industry leading in this sector.

What’s gone well during Q1: 
Our performance in Q1 has improved from last year with 100 collapses against a target of 162 for 2024/2025, compared to 152 collapses against a target of 162 for Q1 2023/2024.   We have a challenging business plan target for this year and our focus is maintaining the good position we are in now, for the rest of the financial year.

What challenges have we faces during Q1: 
Whilst we are performing well, we’ve seen an increase in the percentage of Full Collapses at 34% and Rising Main Collapses at 24% this year to date 2024/2024, compared to Full Collapse 30% and Rising Main Collapse at 10%, year to date 2023/2024. We are working hard to understand what part the challenging weather, that we have seen this year has played in this increase and how it has impacted the general health of the network.

What activities are planned Q2: 
Understanding the health and performance of our network is our key focus and we will continue to work hard to understand all of the factors that contribute to collapses on our network. We are committed to sharing all of our findings with our colleagues in the Sewer Flooding and Pollution Teams and feed our learnings into our communications with customers, through our Network Protection Team and our Blockage Campaigns.

What’s gone well during Q1:
In Q1, we have transitioned to a new customer management system which will enable increased service delivery and support for customers registered on our Priority Services Register (PSR). An example of this is the automated communication to customers to confirm their services requirements once registered for two years. In addition, we have continued our promotion of the PSR across multiple channels, including phone, social media and written communication. It is also promoted on all our billing envelopes with the aim to ensure all customers who may need our priority services are aware of the support we have. 
 
What challenges have we faces during Q1:
As part of our technological development there has been a requirement for us to rebuild our reporting and automated processes for all customers. This has resulted in less outbound communication to customers to confirm they require the PSR services they are registered for. This is being mitigated for with increased activity and communication to customers throughout the rest of the year.
 
What activities are planned Q2:
In the next quarter we will be focussing on increased communication to customers registered on the PSR to ensure they require the services they are registered for and updating as required. We will also be preparing increased promotional activity to customers about the PSR in readiness for changes in weather and potential increased requirements. This will be across a number of channels.