Rob Wilson, CCW Chair: Working with government to improve water services for customers

Over the past week, the new government has been setting out the changes it wants to see to the water sector. Its first priorities are to strengthen environmental regulation and make sure water companies deliver for customers, while also attracting the investment that’s needed to upgrade the pipes and plants that make up our water system. 

As the Chair of the consumer watchdog (the Consumer Council for Water), I obviously want water companies to be held to account for how they treat their customers. And it’s not pretty reading, as CCW’s latest annual customer tracker survey Water Matters paints a grim picture of how consumers view their water companies. All companies recorded their lowest ever score for customer trust. In addition, we saw the largest ever fall in trust in a single year.  

So it was pleasing to see that Defra is planning to set up what I hope will be influential new customer panels to help hold water companies to account. Here at CCW, we are looking forward to working with Defra to design these powerful new bodies. Bringing in people’s lived experience of water and waste services, and the issues they can face, is a surefire way to start changing water company culture to get them to focus more on customer service and less on avoiding accountability. 

Another welcome announcement in the King’s Speech was better protection and compensation for households and businesses when their basic water services are affected. It seems astonishing, but there’s not been a full review of payments for missed standards since 2008. This is something we have been working to change and update.   

Under Defra’s new plans, compensation to people when things go wrong could double. This will benefit hundreds of thousands of people a year. And I think that increasing the amount of compensation the companies have to pay to customers will hopefully incentivise them to get things right first time. Of course we know consumers would prefer things not to go wrong in the first place! 

Defra has also promised some new measures designed to protect our waterways. I want to see more details of how exactly these will work, but I do know that customers want to see companies taking much better care of the environment. People are fed up of seeing sewage flushed out into our rivers and seas. Today only a third of them are satisfied with water companies’ efforts to protect the environment. So it’s absolutely right that companies should be driven harder to become more focused on this. 

It is essential that the current Price Review (PR24), which determines water customer bills for the period 2025 to 2030, gets the right balance between investment and increased customer bills. We are currently undertaking the huge task of reviewing Ofwat’s draft determinations that respond to water companies’ business plans. We aim to ensure water customers’ views are heard clearly and responded to throughout the process. 

As Chair of CCW, the point of contact between CCW and the UK and Welsh governments, I’ll be making sure we fully exploit every opportunity to improve service to water customers – which, after all, is pretty much all of us.