Sustainability
We have a long commitment to becoming more sustainable in all areas of the business. We're working to strike a balance between:
- Service to our customers
- Our impact on the environment and communities
- Customer bills
- Future investment
We know we are not yet where we want to be. But we will continue to work hard to deliver for our customers and the environment more sustainably.
Sustainability themes
Nine themes make up the heart of our sustainability policy. Our policy reflects all areas of our business. It helps us inform and make critical decisions over the long-term. Our nine themes are:
Protecting water, a precious resource
Managing wastewater and sustainable drainage
Mitigating climate change
Adapting to climate change
Delivering efficient operations
Investing sustainably for the long-term
Ensuring responsible operations
Enhancing customer inclusion
Maintaining a safe, inclusive and sustainable workforce
The Sustainability Report and ESG Statement provides our stakeholders a ‘one-stop-shop’ for information. We know we are not where we want to be. We have made progress in a number of areas and have provided short case studies to illustrate this.
Our turnaround plan
Our turnaround plan focuses on areas that’ll best improve core performance and get us in the right position for the future. It focuses on six key operational priorities:
- Health and safety
- Leakage
- Pollutions
- Supply interruptions
- Water quality
- Customer service
By focusing on these areas, we’ll continue to strengthen our operational and financial resilience. This will create a stable platform from which to make faster progress in the future.
Environment, social and governance
We are constantly striving to create value. This is for all our stakeholders, customers, employees, shareholders, and communities. It's essential we demonstrate a strong commitment to sustainability and ethical governance. We use ESG as a lens to help inform our business rather than as a regulatory reporting tool.
As a company we are focused on:
- Becoming more sustainable
- Promoting social responsibility
- Maintaining high standards of governance in all aspects of our business.
We continue to evolve and improve the data tables in the ESG Statement. We want to provide a transparent and comprehensive overview of our ESG performance. The statement covers the past five years. We publish ESG data and information in other documents. We draw it together in a separate ESG Statement. This improves the accessibility and transparency of this information.
In our Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) statement we cover the following areas:
- Environment: Reflecting the interaction of our operations with the natural environment
- Social: Illustrating our relationships and our impact on the economy. This is with our employees, suppliers, customers and communities.
- Governance: Covering the way our business is governed. This covers leadership, remuneration, audits and internal control, and external shareholder dividends
We have strategic ambitions for our approach to becoming more sustainable. To support this, we'll continue to put ESG at the heart of our decision-making.