Water companies urged to ditch ‘impenetrable’ reports

Water companies have been urged to ditch “dense reports which are impenetrable for every day consumers”.

Instead, CCW has proposed a single consumer-led dashboard for the water sector which provides consumers with company performance data on everything from billing to leakage rates.

The consumer group states that the current way of presenting performance data is creating “sustained suspicions that water companies deliberately obfuscate the data and explanations”, in its recent consumer research report in relation to its consumer-lead dashboard proposal.

The report adds: “Now, more than ever, the water industry faces scrutiny in relation to its performance.

“Our research shows that consumers welcome this increased scrutiny: they want greater transparency from their water company in order to understand how it is performing. However, whilst there are a number of different tools available showing performance information, this can often be hard to find or interpret.

“This research shows that there is an appetite for customers to have a single point of easily accessible information about how their company is performing.”

The report adds that consumers “are left feeling frustrated and helpless” when trying to access company performance data which leads “to suspicions that true data is being hidden in the amalgamation”.

It adds that a dashboard would help provide “reassurance and comfort to consumers” that their water company is being transparent.

In particular, CCW proposes that the dashboard would be made up of data relating to:

• Water quality
• Leakage and number of leaks fixed
• Bills and investment
• Pollution incidents / storm overflows, including frequency of pollution incidents and impact of sewage spills
• Complaints from customers
• Overall customer satisfaction on key metrics (bills, complaint response time)

Earlier this year, Ofwat also told water companies to be more transparent. Specially, the regulator urged companies to improve their financial transparency and to make changes to how they present long-term viability statements and dividends.

The regulator has also announced a planned licence change which would make water companies legally obliged to share certain data sets with the public.

The move came following a House of Lords Regulators Committee report which called for water companies to take more action to provide open data on the environmental performance of their wastewater network and treatment works.