Suppliers

As a private Utility, when procuring goods, works and services we are governed by the Procurement Act 2023 (please see below for more information).

All our procurement activity is carried out by our commercial department, whose objective is to support our purpose to provide great water and more for the North West. We build relationships with our key partners and suppliers based on common values to achieve our goals.

We conduct business with around 1,700 suppliers every year, from major international corporations to sole traders. We are committed to meeting our obligations to our suppliers, measuring our progress whilst dealing fairly and ethically at all times.

Our approach to supply chain activity is based on category management which takes a long term holistic view of our demand, specifications and the supplier market to deliver the appropriate contract strategy. Throughout this process we’re encouraging commercial awareness from market to company and encouraging competition wherever necessary.

Our third party spend is around £1.1 billion per annum and consolidated into a number of categories which reflect similar commercial considerations and supply markets, with each category having a dedicated commercial manager. For more key information about our commercial department, please visit our ‘About our service’ page.

We are committed to making our services better, faster, cheaper and safer for our customers and the environment. But we know that in order to do this we need to be innovative and find new ideas to help us. If you have an idea or product that will help us overcome some of our biggest challenges please take a look here.

Treating our supply chain fairly and ethically, through prompt payments and adequate guidance and support, is something we are fully committed to. We, in turn, expect suppliers to uphold high environmental and ethical standards – the tenets of which are described in our Responsible Sourcing Principles and we engage with our supply chain via the United Supply Chain approach.

We maintain high ethical standards of business conduct and corporate governance and expect the same high standards of our supply chain. We utilise our responsible sourcing principles to create a high quality supply chain and provide suppliers with a way of enhancing their performance in the North West and beyond.