Water-only complaints jump 66% after extreme weather

The number of complaints about water-only companies rose 66% year-on-year following supply interruptions during extreme weather.

Although billing disputes dominated the causes of grievances, water watchdog CCW said environmental factors such as the hot, dry summer and freeze-thaw in 2022 triggered an influx of customer complaints when water supplies were affected.

South East was named as the most complained about water-only company with disputes related to the freeze thaw, and how subsequent compensation claims were dealt, leading to a surge in customer contacts. 

Southern and Thames were the most complained about water and sewerage companies with 4.7 and 2.7 times more than the average amount of issues raised against them.

“Trust in the water sector has never been more fragile and the task of rebuilding it is made all the more challenging when companies perform as poorly as Thames Water and Southern Water,” said Mike Keil, chief executive at CCW.

“We’re especially concerned that these two companies have not performed well across all the main causes for people to complain and that Thames, in particular, is compounding customers’ frustrations with delays and a failure to resolve many issues first time. Customers have a right to expect better from such an essential utility provider where switching supplier is not an option.”

While no company was classified as good at handling complaints, Wessex, Hafren Dyfrdwy, Bristol and Portsmouth were all rated good for the low number of complaints lodged.

During the year, 232,817 complaints were made to water companies and 6,197 escalated to the consumer body, which was up just 1% compared to the last year.

CCW calculated that the cost of handling these escalated grievances was £1.5 million – or one-fifth of its annual budget, which could have been avoided.

CCW noted that Thames and Southern “stand out as poor performers” in terms of volume of complaints having received 4.6 times more than the industry average for water and sewerage companies.

Katy Taylor, chief customer officer at Southern, said: “We recognise that we need to do better at serving our customers and fixing their problems. We are investing in video diagnostics, up-skilling our customer service agents and keeping our customers regularly informed when issues take longer to fix. While we are seeing early signs of improvement in the quality and speed we deal with their queries, we know we still have a lot of work to do and are committed to significant improvements.”

Meanwhile, Thames like Southern is also in the throes of a turnaround.

“We’ve been working hard to turnaround our performance and have reduced our total household complaints by 28% percent compared to last year alongside a large reduction in telephone complaints,” said David Bird, retail director at Thames.

“We’re absolutely focused on continuing to improve the quality of customers’ journeys with our business, from their first contact with us right through to the resolution of their complaints. We’ve completed the onshoring of our customer service call centre in Swindon so we can be closer to our customers and deliver the reliable and better-quality service they deserve. We are also investing additional resources to improve our response times to customers and to reduce the need for second stage complaints.”

For water only providers, South East reported 1.6 times more complaints than the average.

There was a marked rise in the number of complaints relating to administration with 20% more made to CCW year-on-year. The report said these were largely due companies not responding to queries and delays to compensation. Companies with the steepest increases in these were Affinity (+373%), South East (+333%) and Anglian (+190%).

The watchdog said these types of complaints were “well within the gift of companies to resolve without the need for escalation”.

CCW urged companies to be empathetic when dealing with debt in the current economic climate and lauded the sector for there not being an uptick in complaints about debt recovery.

This is the first year CCW has included all forms of complaints to companies within their analysis, where previously only written complaints had been collated.