Our purpose, strategic priorities and core values

We have a strong track record in minimising pollution, and continue to protect bathing waters across the North West. River health in the UK has grown in public interest in recent years. The industrial legacy and high rainfall in our region means we have a bigger task than many to deliver the significant reduction in spills from storm overflows required by the Environment Act 2021. This will form a significant component of our investment in AMP8, with £3.1 billion dedicated to it in our business plan, and we are accelerating part of this investment, with good progress already made.

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

We strive to continually improve our service for customers – improving water quality, minimising interruptions, fixing leaks and reducing the risk of sewer flooding. Engagement helps us understand what matters most to customers – the stretching targets in our AMP8 business plan reflect views based on extensive engagement and this is reflected in strong levels of customer acceptability. Great service also means helping customers with affordability and vulnerability support, and keeping their data secure.

We invest in our colleagues’ training and development, and are dedicated to maintaining 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.

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 innovation to find better ways of working, raising efficient financing and managing risk prudently, leveraging partnerships and driving value in our supply chain, capitalising on digital and automation opportunities, and removing areas of duplication or waste.

We work closely with communities across the North West and we invest in those communities as well as opening our land for access and recreation. We actively engage and make use of partnerships to drive value for communities, such as our participation in the Love Windermere initiative. We produced individual business plans for each of the North West’s five counties, recognising their unique and diverse needs and challenges, and we have mobilised our teams into county delivery squads to help manage these relationships and ensure we can deliver our planned improvements for each county with minimal disruption.