Our business overview

We hold a licence to provide water and sewage services to a population of around seven million people in North West England. We also take our expertise and experience and apply it in competitive utility infrastructure markets in the UK and overseas.

Our regulated activities

Our water business is regulated in terms of both price and performance. The water regulator, Ofwat, reviews our price limits every five years. In the period between 2005-2010 we are investing more than £3 billion to improve the water and wastewater infrastructure and the environment right across the North West.

We work around the clock, 365 days a year, to supply around 1.9 billion litres of water every day to approximately 3.2 million homes and businesses before removing it safely and treating it before returning it to the environment.

We have:

• 3.2 million customers and serve 7 million people
• 42,000 kilometres of water pipes, stretching from Cumbria down to Cheshire
• 43,419 kilometres of sewers
• 138 impounding reservoirs across the region
• 582 wastewater treatment works

Since 1990:

• Our water quality has improved from 99.6% to 99.94% - the best it's ever been
• Compliance with bathing water standards across the North West has risen from 30.3% to 90.6%
• We've halved the amount of leakage from our networks due to our on-going investment programme to replace worn out pipes
• We've invested more than £4,000 for each household in the North West, some £750 above the national average

Our non-regulated activities

We apply our core skills of our regulated business through our outsourcing contracts, now serving more than 20 million people worldwide across Europe, the Middle East, Australia and the Philippines. We also operate a highly successful multi-utility connections business, manage metering contracts and are flexing our engineering and operational skills in emerging markets such as muncipal solid waste.

We have major contracts in the UK with Dwr Cymru Welsh Water, Southern Water, Scottish Water, Northern Gas Networks and Electricity North West. We have a meter installation contract with British Gas Trading, as well as three Scottish private finance initiative operations relating to water and wastewater infrastructure.

We are focusing on applying our core skills on an asset-light basis, primarily in the Gulf region but we also continue to operate existing overseas water and wastewater operations through a number of joint ventures in parts of Australia, Estonia, Bulgaria, the Philippines and Poland.