Position statements

As well as providing an excellent service and high quality drinking water to our customers we appreciate that a lot of what we do impacts on society as a whole.

We like to be open about our position on things that affect our customers, such as climate change or price rises.  Here are our position statements on some of the latest hot topics. 

Cave Review into competition and innovation

DEFRA are currently consulting on the recommendations made by the Cave Review. This covered a number of areas and our positions on this range of issues are:-

• We believe that the current regime works well and has delivered significant benefits for customers.
• Companies do put out contracts to competitive tender and this helps ensure that investment is delivered as cost effectively as possible. There is no need to make this compulsory.
• We are not yet convinced that retail competition in water supply will deliver significant customers benefits and therefore support the phased approach, where the benefits are demonstrated before competition is extended, proposed in the Cave Review.
• We agree that the special merger regime should be amended so that good water companies can acquire other water companies.

Find out more about our latest innovations

Climate change

We're committed to playing our part in responding to the challenges of climate change through adaptation and mitigation.

In some cases, new regulations don't balance the need for higher quality standards with the potential carbon impact of delivering these standards. Better alignment of regulators and Government is essential if we're to deliver stretching carbon goals.

Chapter 3 of our Strategic Direction Statement below contains our full position on climate change.

Strategic Direction Statement (1mb)

Surface water drainage charges

The Government has now legislated to allow water companies to provide discretionary discounts from surface water charges to particular groups. These charges were only implemented by a small number of companies originally and were in line with OfWat guidance on ensuring that charges are allocated in line with use of the sewerage network.

Unfortunately, different companies did take different approaches to implementing these charges and this led to a significant difference in the charges experienced by different groups across the country.

It is essential therefore that the new power is clear in its scope and application. Government should define which groups can benefit from the new discounts. Leaving this at the discretion of another body may only perpetuate rather than resolve the confusion caused by the current company by company implementation approach.

Fluoridation

We're governed by the Strategic Health Authorities on this issue. It is up to each authority to decide whether they want the water to be fluoridated. Currently no water in Yorkshire is fluoridated.

Click here for more information on fluoridation

Private to public sewer transfer

On 15 December 2008, Hilary Benn announced that responsibility
for private sewers and lateral drains will pass to the 10 water and sewerage companies from 2011.

In Yorkshire, the change will see us take responsibility for 22,000 kilometres of private sewer pipes, on top of the 33,000 kilometres of public sewers we already look after. 

We support the transfer, as we believe that it is good for our customers.  The transfer will provide much greater clarity on ownership and responsibilities, and the cost of maintenance and repairs will be distributed fairly across our customer base. 

Read our briefing on the sewer transfer

Affordability and debt

In Yorkshire we have demonstrated that our proactive and innovative approach to debt management can mitigate the challenging circumstances relating to our customer base.

We recognise the need to support vulnerable customers. We offer a variety of flexible payment methods through Watersure, our Community Trust and Resolve schemes which go some way to help those in difficult circumstances.

The key is to be able to differentiate between the 'won't pays' and 'can't pays'. We need to consider the impact of social tariffs on all customers as any shortfall in income would need to be paid for through customer bills.

Flood and Water Management

Since the floods of 2007 we have played an active role in developing a multi-agency approach to water management planning and flood emergency response in partnership with regional local authorities and with the Environment Agency in our region. We feel this multi-agency approach is the best way to deliver improved flood protection and management for the future and we welcome this model now being enshrined in law in the Flood and Water Management Act.

As we expressed during the passage of the Flood and Water Management Bill through Parliament, we feel that water companies have an even greater role to play in surface water management. We feel that opportunities have been missed to give water companies greater responsibilities that would ensure that we have a complete understanding and control of our networks. We remain convinced that water companies would be best placed to own and manage SUDS given the significant interdependence with the sewerage network. Likewise, we feel that the missed opportunity to remove the automatic right to connect to the sewerage network will mean that we water companies remain handicapped in terms of the risk of overloaded sewers.

Given the concerns raised by local authorities about lack of funding for their new responsibilities we are interested to see how this plays out. We remain committed to the multi-agency approach and we look forward to continuing and expanding on the important partnership work that is already established in Yorkshire with local authorities and the Environment Agency.

Price Review 2009

For more information on how we'll invest in our drinking water and waste water network and how much we'll charge customers to reflect this investment click here.