Sustainability and reporting

We have a longstanding commitment to becoming more sustainable, which touches all areas of the business. Sustainability is an increasingly important consideration as we seek to strike a balance between the level of service we provide to our customers, our impact on the environment and communities, the cost of customer bills and future investment in the business. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made in the last year and continue to work hard to deliver the desired results for our customers and the environment.

At the heart of our sustainable thinking are nine themes making up our sustainability policy, which is agreed by our Board. Our policy reflects all areas of our business, helping us make the critical decisions that safeguard the delivery of our services 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 and sustainable workforce.

We have reset our corporate strategy, integrating ‘generating public value’ which is very much aligned with our approach to sustainability and underlines how seriously we take being a responsible business and going above and beyond our core functions to do the right thing for today and tomorrow.

We’re aligning our sustainability reporting with our Annual Report and Annual Performance Report to give our stakeholders a ‘one-stop-shop’ for content. We have previously reported on sustainability in our online Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Reports, with previous versions being available to downloaded below

To support our strategic ambitions and our approach to sustainability, we continue to put the Environment, Social and Governance agenda at the heart of our financial decision-making. As well as our regulatory and financial submissions, our Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) performance is independently benchmarked to provide insights into our sustainability performance.

We publish ESG data and information in other documents, however, to improve the accessibility and transparency of this information, we draw it together in a separate ESG Statement. It includes references to the sources for a range of key performance measures, to give balance and context for our latest performance information.