Sustainability and reporting

We’ve had a long commitment to be more sustainable in all areas of the business. Sustainability is a more important consideration as we strike a balance between service to our customers, our impact on the environment and communities, customer bills and future investment. We’re proud of the progress in the last year and continue to work hard to deliver for our customers and the environment.

Nine themes make up the heart of our sustainability policy, which is agreed by our Board. Our policy reflects all areas of our business. It helps us 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 and sustainable workforce

We’ve reset our corporate strategy, adding ‘generating public value’ which aligns with our approach to sustainability. This shows how seriously we take being a responsible business and go beyond our core functions to do the right thing for today and tomorrow.

Environment, Social and Governance

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

Although we publish ESG data and information in other documents, we draw it together in a separate ESG Statement to improve the accessibility and transparency of this information. In October 2021, we published our fourth ESG Statement which brings together data from 2016 to 2021 and includes references to the sources of a range of key performance measures to give balance and context for our latest performance information.

Sustainability reporting

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've previously reported on sustainability in our Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Reports.

Past reports