Aa

Delivering for our customers

We're delighted to share Our Plan for Change 2025-30. Our plan reflects your priorities, using the information more than 250,000 of you have told us over three years of engagement, research and feedback. We have heard from those of you living in towns and cities, those in rural communities, those living near beaches and those living inland. It has also reflected the views of businesses and households, visitors and residents, water retailers and housing developers.

You’ve told us, for example, that continuing to provide clean, resilient drinking water remains your number one priority.

You’ve also told us that reducing pollutions and protecting our bathing waters is absolutely vital.

You agree with us, that as a socially responsible business, it is the right thing to ensure we are protecting the environment, enhancing nature and working to deliver net zero.

And you’ve told us that we must balance the need and speed of change with keeping bills affordable for everyone, and supporting those customers who need additional help.

We have listened to your feedback, as well as to your challenges and concerns. We hear, and share, your passion for our region.

Informed and founded on your priorities, we have developed four strategic priorities, which together allow us to set and deliver Our Plan for Change.

Our strategic priorities

Staff member inspecting water
1/4

1. Water quality & resilience

  • Upgrading a third of water treatment works across our regions
  • Building new resources – including Cheddar 2 in Bristol
  • Creating a water grid to ensure all our strategic reservoirs are connected and we can move resource across the region
  • Reducing leakage on our networks to less than 10% and less than 4% on customer properties
Cornish sandy beach
2/4

2. Storm overflows & pollutions

  • Tackling every beach by 2030 – 5 years ahead of target
  • Building trust in our bathing water quality with a commitment to a sampling a monitoring programme
  • Taking a ’Green First’ principle for tackling storm overflows
  • Achieving the lowest in sector pollution levels, with zero 'serious' pollutions
Numerous rows of solar panels
3/4

3. Net zero & environmental gains

  • Achieving Net Zero by 2030
  • Planting 300,000 trees to boost nature recovery and launching our ponds initiative
  • Recycling more waste and generating enough energy to power 20,000 homes
  • Expanding our award-winning Upstream Thinking catchment management programme to deliver 146,500 hectares by 2030
  • Creation of an independent WaterFit environmental advisory board
Staff member talking to customer in kitchen
4/4

4. Addressing affordability & delivering for our customers

  • Extending our zero water poverty pledge to 2030
  • Ensuring fair charging for all our customers
  • Accelerating smart metering, helping household customers use 5% less water

Latest information on our PR24 business plan

Since submission of our PR24 business plan to Ofwat in October 2023, we have made changes to parts of our plan. These have been in response to requests from Ofwat or other regulators and to clarify some points in our original plan. The result of these changes to date is that Ofwat are now considering a PR24 business plan for South West Water (including Bristol Water) that includes total expenditure of £4,468.792million (down from £4,469.265 million from our October 2023 plan), and average annual customer bills of £596.04 by 2030 (down from £620.52 in our October 2023 plan). We expect Ofwat's draft determinations will be based on this expenditure and these bills.
 
The main reason for the change to our total expenditure for PR24 and associated average annual customer bills is due minor data alignments between our business plan tables and financial model.

Our business plan tables submitted on 2nd October, already included the Environment Agency’s 18 September 2023 version of the Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP).

View our Calculation of PR24 business plan costs - SWB

View our Calculation of PR24 business plan costs - BRL

View our BPT - Companies change log - SBB

View our BP Tables V6- BRL as at 25.01.24

View our BP Tables V6 - SBB as at 25.01.24

View our BP Tables V6 - SWB as at 25.01.24

Main documents

Our strategic priorities

Evidence against quality tests

Data tables

Supporting documents

Strategic plans to 2050

Models part 1

Models part 2

Our customer workshops

Get involved and make a real difference in how our business is run by being part of our extensive customer research programme.

Our customer workshops image