Clean water pipes
Business Customer's responsibility
You’re usually responsible for:
- All the plumbing inside your premises.
- The pipe between your building and boundary of your property, known as the supply pipe.
- Stop taps on your property (inside or outside).
Please note: Where your water supply is fed from a Yorkshire Water Main pipe in a neighbouring street, supply pipes under a highway/public footpath are still the customer responsibility to maintain.
If your supply pipe runs through someone else's property, it's still your responsibility.
If any of these pipes leak or you have faulty plumbing in your property, it's down to you. Before you look for a plumber, check if your plumbing is covered by your business insurance or under a separate policy.
Joint supply responsibility
If your property is older, you might share a supply pipe with your neighbours. If you’re not sure if you share, we can find out for you. One sign may be if you experience low pressure or flow from your taps when your neighbours use the supply.
If you have a shared supply pipe, you’re jointly responsible for maintaining and repairing it.
Yorkshire Water's responsibility
At Yorkshire Water, we’re usually responsible for most of the pipework outside the street boundary.
This includes:
- water mains
- stop taps in the road or pavement (NB. We currently will not renew any existing inoperable external stop-taps or provide a new external stop-tap, unless there is an urgent risk to health such as no water to the property or a confirmed serious leak.)
- the communication pipe leading up to the boundary of your home.
Your water meter and its connections also belong to us and we’ll take care of any repairs or replacements.
Please note: Where your water supply is fed from a YW Main pipe in a neighbouring street, supply pipes under a highway/public footpath are still the customer responsibility to maintain.
New Process for External Stop-taps and external shut-off requests
To ensure our resource and funding is invested in the areas that need it most, we have made the decision to stop attending external stop tap requests required for private work not related to a leak.
Private work can be completed without the operation of the external stop tap e.g. using the internal stop tap, freezing a section of the internal pipe, etc. We recommend seeking assistance from a plumber.
Whilst Yorkshire Water remains responsible for external stop-taps located in the public highway, we will only consider renewing or installing a new external stop-tap if it meets the following criteria:
- If there is an urgent risk to health such as no water to the property
- If there is a confirmed serious leak
We will not attend to a broken or inoperable stop tap, locate an external stop tap, isolate the supply or make a chamber accessible unless there is a leak which you are unable to isolate yourself.
For all other external stop tap situations we are unable to provide support and it remains the customers responsibility to ensure the internal stop-tap is in good working condition. You should never rely on an external stop-tap to be able to turn the water off inside your home as the internal stop-tap or valve is the quickest and easiest way to do this.
