To provide great
water and more for
the North West

Our key resources

Natural resources

We rely on natural resources to apply water and take back wastewater after treatment, as well as to generate renewable energy. We own and manage large areas of land.

Financing

Financing allows us to preserve intergenerational equity for customers while funding long-term capital investment, and we maintain access to a range of markets to seek good value.

People

We rely on skilled and engaged employees and suppliers to deliver our services, and must ensure skills are maintained across the generations through training and development.

Assets

We invest significantly to maintain and enhance our assets and build long-term resilience, and we use telemetry across the network to monitor and control many assets remotely.

See Our key resources

Our external drivers and relationships

Natural environment

We must be resilient to changes such as climate change and population growth, and ensure our impact on the natural environment is positive.

Stakeholders

Our work and the huge areas of land we manage impacts a wide variety of stakeholders and we consult them to help develop and execute our plans.

Technology and innovation

New technology and innovations create opportunities for improvements in service and efficiency, but can also create risks such as cyber security.

Economic environment

The economy impacts our financing, through market rate movements such as interest rates and inflation, and our customers' ability to pay their bills.

Regulatory environment

Regulators' priorities drive our five-year commitments, and we must actively engage to influence and prepare for future market reforms in the industry.

Political environment

This includes regional and national politicians as well as policy makers, and we must understand the key policy issues affecting our industry.

See Our external drivers and relationships

Our strategy and core values

Our strategy sets out how we deliver our purpose, and is broken down into three strategic themes, which govern everything we do.

Our core values - to be customer-focused, innovative and trustworthy - provide the cultural framework we operate in.

See Our purpose and strategy

The best service to customers

At the lowest sustainable cost

In a responsible manner

Our planning horizons

We undertake long, medium, and short-term planning, taking into account our external drivers and what matters to stakeholders.

See How we plan for the future

  • Our business is very long-term by nature and we must build resilience to ensure we can continue to provide this essential service.

  • Medium-term planning reflects our five-year regulatory periods, and aims to help us work towards our long-term plans.

  • We set annual targets but retain flexibility in these short-term targets to respond to challenges and meet our five-year goals in the most effective and efficient way possible.

  • 1 year

  • 5 years

  • 25+ years

What we do

Our core activities are to deliver essential water and wastewater services for household and business customers across the North West of England.

In order to deliver this, we maintain and operate thousands of kilometres of pipes and hundreds of treatment works, as well as renewable energy facilities that use our land and bioresources from wastewater treatment to generate clean electricity to help power our operations.

See What we do

How we do it

In order to deliver these essential services in the most effective way, we take an integrated approach that considers waht is most material to our stakeholders and to our ability to create value, our risk management, our commitment to environmental, social and governance matters, and our pioneering Systems Thinking approach to operating our network and assets.

See Introduction

Our prioritisation of issues

We engage with our stakeholders to understand their priorities and balance their different and often conflicting views

Our risk management

We manage a wide variety of risks to enable us to focus on delivering a sustainable and resilient service for the long-term

Our commitment to ESG matters

We operate in an environmentally and socially conscious manner and uphold the highest standards of corporate governance

Systems Thinking

We operate our network as a system rather than discrete assets, and we have a backbone of sensors that enable remote monitoring and control

The value we generate