Our purpose, strategic themes and core values

We are a sector leader in minimising pollution, and continue to protect bathing waters across the North West. River health in the UK has received a lot of public interest. The legacy industrial nature and high rainfall in our region means we have a bigger task than many to deliver the significant reduction in storm overflow activations required by the Environment Act 2021. This will form a significant component of our 2025–30 business plan, and we are accelerating investment with good progress already made.

We are committed to protecting nature and biodiversity, and reducing water consumption. We have six carbon pledges underpinned by ambitious science-based targets and a net zero transition plan. We are looking at how we can make the best use of our land to deliver clean energy, be that through our pledges to create woodland and restore peatland, or increasing our renewable energy generation capacity.

We invest in our colleagues’ training and development, and maintain high levels of health, safety and wellbeing. We want to attract, develop and engage great talent across the organisation, we support and encourage a diverse and inclusive culture, and we want colleagues to be empowered to contribute to making things better.

Delivering great service means continually improving our ways of working across the whole business. Improving water quality, minimising interruptions, leakage and sewer flooding, and supporting customers with affordability and vulnerability. Engagement helps us understand what matters most to customers and we act on their feedback. This can be seen in the way we redesigned our bills based on customer research, and the early investment we are making to improve customer and environmental performance faster.

We continuously challenge ourselves to improve cost efficiency in a sustainable way, so we can keep customer bills as low as possible in the long term without compromising on service or resilience. We look to minimise whole-life cost and deliver the best value solutions, using Systems Thinking and innovation to find better ways of working, leveraging partnerships and driving value in our supply chain, capitalising on digital and automation opportunities, and removing areas of duplication or waste.

Our work means we are working closely within communities across the North West and we want to ensure we are visible and trusted. We actively engage and make use of partnerships to drive value for communities, such as our Love Windermere initiative. With a lot to deliver in the years ahead, we have appointed regional stakeholder managers for each of the five counties to help manage these relationships and ensure we can deliver our planned improvements with minimal disruption.