Water retailers must make more of an effort to engage and communicate with wholesalers, Southern Water’s customer services director Simon Oates has insisted.
Wholesalers need to up their game when it comes to engaging with retailers, but retailers need to “come to the party as well”, Oates told delegates at Utility Week’s Water Customer conference.
During a freeze-thaw incident last year, a lot of the retailers “weren’t geared up” to deal with it as they “hadn’t engaged with the broader social contract” that the sector needs to deliver, he said.
There’s an immaturity in the relationship between wholesalers and retailers in the open water market, which opened fewer than two years ago. Therefore, Oates said, relationships between the different companies are still developing.
The non-household water retail market opened to competition in April 2017 and, since then, it has continued to grow and evolve. As of 1 June 2018, there were 747 active contracts between wholesalers and retailers.
However, there is no standardised method by which retailers and wholesalers should communicate. This is adding complexity for retailers, which find they have to deal with 20 different wholesalers all using different methods.
Flaws in the relationships between wholesalers and retailers were further exposed by a fierce storm dubbed the “Beast from the East” that hit the UK last winter and the subsequent freeze-thaw incident which followed, leaving around 200,000 customers without water for at least four hours.
In a report looking at how companies dealt with the storm, Ofwat expressed disappointment at the response of some companies, especially as the severe weather was forecast in advance.