Supporting the green recovery
We’re helping our region recover from the Covid-19 pandemic by investing in our services and creating new jobs.
What have we done so far?
From April to September 2020, we invested around £500m and recruited more than 750 new starters. When many people were losing their jobs, we're proud to support local employment.
What’s next?
We're creating 1,000 new jobs in 2021 and tripling the number of apprenticeships we offer. We're also supporting 50 unemployed young people as part of the government’s Kickstart scheme.
In January 2021, we also put forward new proposals to speed up our programme to install smart meters. This will involve fitting an extra 810,000 smart meters between 2020 and 2025. This is as well as the 690,000 meters in our existing plan.
Our proposals would:
- Create around 500 jobs for people with little training or experience
- Speed up our programme to make sure that all our customers have a meter Research with our customers shows they see this as the fairest way to pay
- Reduce the amount of water we need to take from rivers in our region, protecting sensitive chalk streams and the wildlife they support
You can read more about our proposals, which are being reviewed by the government and our regulators.
We're also taking forward other projects that support the country’s green recovery from the pandemic, including:
- A project on the River Chess in Buckinghamshire and River Windrush in Gloucestershire to improve river quality
- Accelerating a number of schemes that form part of the Water Industry National Environment Programme, improving rivers in our region
- Increasing renewable energy generation by building solar panels on our sites
- Injecting upgraded gas created from the sewage treatment process to the mains grid
- Exploring the transfer of renewable heat from our operations to communities near our sites