Ofwat chief executive Rachel Fletcher has called for a national education campaign around water usage, on the day the regulator published its new strategy.
Speaking at Utility Week Congress, Fletcher said that customers had often felt reluctant to engage with water scarcity issues because of a perception that their provider did not have a handle on leakage.
She praised the public commitments made by the UK’s water companies but said these needed to be communicated to the public at large and must also be backed by firm action.
Today, Ofwat published its new strategy, aimed at helping transform water company performance, meet long-term challenges and embed public purpose into the sector
Setting out the principals of this strategy at Utility Week Congress, Fletcher said: “We are setting out three goals.
“Firstly, to transform the performance of the industry. It’s fair to say that water companies are not consistently meeting customer’s expectations. In some areas performance is stagnating. In some companies, performance is going backwards and particularly the challenges of variance in weather and increase in population is beginning to take its toll.
“The second plank is ensuring much greater collaboration across the industry as a whole in ensuring reliable, affordable supplies for future generations while improving the environment.
“Finally, recognising water companies have an opportunity to do much more for society and the environment. The goal should be to become public value providers not just a provider of a transactional service.”
Fletcher said water companies had shown their commitment to this vision and that the recent public interest commitments were a good step forward. These make water the first industry to pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030, as well as making far reaching commitments around plastics, leakage, water poverty and social inclusion.
Fletcher said: “We have got a massive amount of ambition and companies recognising they are about more than just giving a good service at a decent price and making a good return for their shareholders. What we need to do over the next few years is get from good words into some really impressive action.”
She went on to stress that a key part of this was for firms to drive real change in water consumption among customers. Part of this, she said, could include a public information campaign.
She said: “One of the things that stops customers using water wisely and listening to the advice is that they don’t believe their provider is doing a particularly good job of using water. They see a leak at the end of their road and they think – what does it matter if I water my rose bush then. There is an absolute necessity for companies to step up their performance.”
She added: “I would really like to see a national campaign on water use. I don’t think in my whole life that I have thought about my water consumption more than half an hour. It just has not registered on my consciousness. We take water that has been taken from the environment, cleaned to food standard safety – a very energy-intensive process – and we use it to clean our mountain bikes. These things have to stop but we need to do more of these things by education because most of us just haven’t had the time to consider the impact we have on the environment through our water use.”