Ofwat's chief executive, David Black, says water companies need to take ownership of their failures, and address root causes of issues.
His comments come as the regulator ordered firms to pay £157.6 million back to customers after missing key targets on pollution, leaks, supply interruptions and falling customer satisfaction. Report by Alibhaiz. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
His comments come as the regulator ordered firms to pay £157.6 million back to customers after missing key targets on pollution, leaks, supply interruptions and falling customer satisfaction. Report by Alibhaiz. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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NewsTranscript
00:00At The Last Price Review, we set companies a target of reducing pollution incidents by 30%.
00:06To date, companies have reduced pollution incidents by just 2%.
00:10Leakage has made better progress, but again, we required them to reduce leakage by 16%
00:16and leakages down by just 6% after four years.
00:20Often we see, when there are failures, companies blame the weather,
00:23or sometimes even blame their customers,
00:26or blame the difficult geographical circumstances that they face.
00:30We need to see companies take ownership, we need to see them take responsibility,
00:34and we need to see them address the root causes of these issues.
00:37And in the companies that are in what we call the lagging category,
00:40so the worst companies, we require them to prepare performance improvement plans,
00:45identifying root causes, and taking action to address these causes.
00:49It's a 20% increase in bills to fund a 300% increase in investment.
00:53So that's needed to reduce leakage, but also to reduce the harm to the environment,
01:02and to bring forward new reservoirs.
01:04So we're talking about nine new reservoirs coming forward to safeguard water supplies in the future.