UN Sustainable Development Goals

We have a sector-leading package of affordability support for people across the North West, a region that contains more areas of extreme deprivation than any other in England. In the last three years alone, we have helped more than 330,000 households and lifted more than 84,000 customers out of water poverty. We are also strong supporters of the Consumer Council for Water’s drive to implement a national social tariff.

Providing great water is a key part of our purpose. This is the reason we exist, ensuring customers in the North West have safe, resilient and affordable water and wastewater services. This includes avoiding wasting water – we work hard to tackle leakage and promote water efficiency through campaigns, advice, education and free water saving gadgets for customers. We also protect and enhance water-related ecosystems across our region through initiatives such as our Catchment Systems Thinking approach.

We are a significant contributor to the North West economy. Our daily operations provide direct, indirect and induced employment for 22,700 people. We provide training and development opportunities, and programmes for young people experiencing difficulties securing employment. We offer equal opportunities to all, value diversity amongst our colleagues, and support and encourage an inclusive environment.

We invest heavily in infrastructure, including plans for over £4 billion between 2020 and 2025 to improve the performance and resilience of our assets and operations to impacts such as those arising from climate change. We embrace innovation, especially in an increasingly digital world, to ensure the region where we operate has reliable, sustainable and resilient infrastructure, now and into the future.

We use our understanding of customer needs and priorities to deliver services that meet their expectations and engage with communities to enhance participation in what we do. We plan at least 25 years into the future to prepare for increases in the population and new housing that will need connections for water and wastewater services. We are exploring ways to do this using natural solutions to manage water and wastewater, such as Sustainable Drainage Solutions (SuDS).

We are committed to sustainably managing natural resources, including reducing leakage (from our network and in customer properties) and encouraging and supporting our customers to reduce water consumption. We generate renewable energy and high quality fertilise from bioresources, and more than 98 per cent of our waste goes to beneficial use. We report on many sustainability metrics in both our integrated annual report and sustainability report.

Responding to the climate emergency is an imperative for us all and building a greener North West is a key ambition of our purpose and one of our strategic priorities. Delivering against our carbon pledges and science-based targets to reduce emissions, working towards our net zero target, whilst ensuring that our activities and the North West region are resilient to the impacts that a changing climate might bring, is key to our long-term planning.

We are sector leaders in minimising pollution, with zero serious pollution incidents in three of the last four years, and we look after 25 designated coastal bathing waters in the North West. We have made good progress, with significant further ambitions, on improving river water quality, which has a knock-on impact on the health of our oceans. This includes reducing storm overflow activations and addressing nutrient imbalance.

We run our business in a responsible manner, and doing the right thing is one of our core values. We maintain high standards in corporate governance and ethical standards of business conduct – those systems and processes through which our organisation is managed, controlled and held accountable. We are committed to open, honest and transparent corporate reporting.