Wonderful on Tap

We’d love all homes in our region to be the most water efficient they can be, which is why we’re passionate about supporting both our customers and developers to achieve just that, when building a new home.

Our ‘Infrastructure charges discount scheme’ invites our customers  and developers to be part of our water saving ambition and in return, we’ll help them to save money on the cost of new builds. We do this by offering discounts on both clean water and sewerage infrastructure charges (by up to 100%) if house builders install water efficient fixtures and fittings to meet our qualifying conditions.

Water quality help and advice.

Every year our Education team visit hundreds of schools across the region to talk to pupils about water and it’s journey from reservoir to tap. 

As well as conducting assemblies and delivering classroom sessions, the team use their passion and enthusiasm to share ways to save water through fun and interactive sessions. These lessons get great feedback from schools and pupils alike and are really helping to create the next generation of water consumers.  

As well as visiting schools we also conduct presentations to local community groups and host visits at some of our facilities.

Information on our workshops and visits.

Every year we invest millions in improving our infrastructure, so that we can continue to supply our customers with wonderful water.

We’re currently working on one of our biggest ever improvement projects for our customers in Birmingham, and for the first time in history, Birmingham will have a back-up water supply. For decades, over a million people across the city have been supplied with water from Wales through the Elan Valley Aqueduct. The aqueduct is an incredible piece of engineering created by the Victorians to bring water 70 miles from Wales to Birmingham.

After a century of use the aqueduct requires regular maintenance and repairs so we'll need to take it out of action from time to time. The new back-up supply ensure we can keep water flowing for people across the city for the next 100 years.

Water quality help and advice. 

Reducing the amount of water lost through leakage is hugely important for all of us.  Over the last 10 years, we’ve reduced leakage within our region by 20% and we’ve committed to reduce this by a further 15% by 2020. So how will we do this?  

With over 49,000km of pipes supplying water to homes and businesses, tracking down
and fixing leaks takes continuous effort.  So as well as asking our customers to be our eyes on the ground we’re also investing heavily in new technology so that we can identify leaks, sometimes even before they happen.  

• This year we committed an additional investment in new ‘in-pipe’ monitoring devices which allow us to spot where water may be escaping and quickly despatch a team to investigate and fix problems.
• We use drones to find leaks in hard to reach areas.  Many of our pipes cross rural and inaccessible locations so getting a view from the air can be vital in finding them.
• We’ve been testing satellite technology since 2017 to track down leaks. This enables us to identify potential problem areas from space and cleverly distinguishes between treated water and standing water.  It also allows us to spot problems before they happen by studying ground movements around our pipes.

On top of finding and fixing leaks we are also investing £150m by 2020 to replace some of our older pipes.