Our mains renewal programme

Capital schemes are investment projects that we’re carrying out to improve our performance and ensure that we can deliver the service our customers expect. 

We’re investing £8.3bn across Yorkshire between April 2025 and April 2030, which is our largest ever environmental investment. As part of that investment, we’re spending £406m to replace more than 1000km of clean water pipes across Yorkshire – that's enough to stretch from Land’s End to John O’Groats. These pipes are old and prone to bursting - replacing them now will reduce the risk of this happening in the future, helping to save water and reduce disruption to you. 

Our mains replacement schemes typically focus on two key areas: ensuring compliance with water quality regulations and replacing ageing pipes that are prone to bursting. 

We prioritise investments by analysing data on the frequency of pipe bursts and assigning a risk rating to each. This helps us figure out which pipes need fixing first. We also consider the whole area to make sure we’re getting the best value for our money and reducing the need to come back to the same spot during the Asset Management Period (AMP). 

Contracting work ensures we can use experts in the right fields and make use of innovative technologies and practices, as well as driving value for money and efficiency for our customers. 

We make sure that every project we undertake has a really thorough investigation and design process. We work closely with our partners to make sure the proposed design will achieve the right improvements. 

Once the design has been agreed, our trusted contractors deliver the investment on the ground, which includes continual monitoring and regular checks to ensure the work meets the carefully created design. 

Framework partners are selected on usually long-term contracts using several criteria. Some areas of focus are quality, health and safety recording, cost, social values and the environment. 

As water mains are needed to supply customers' homes, they are usually located close to properties on residential streets and footpaths; in more rural areas, they may also cross private land and fields. 

Wherever we’re working, we’ll always do our best to keep disruption to a minimum and keep our customers and key partners in the loop along the way. 

If work is in the road, we’ll liaise first with the local highway authority to agree when work can take place, what traffic management is required and any special requirements for working times or reinstatement. 

To keep everyone safe, we’ll often have to use temporary traffic lights or close the road while we’re working. We’ll always try to maintain access to driveways and off-street parking, but on-street parking may be restricted. We’ll write to directly affected residents to let them know of any work that might affect them. 

We may need to interrupt the water supply while we connect up new pipework to our existing network; if we do, customers are warned in advance with a hand-delivered card. 

In our letter we ask residents to contact us if they have any special circumstances relating to their access or water supply that we need to know about. 

Customers often want to know about the anticipated improvements and enhancements to water services or infrastructure over time.  

By replacing the clean water mains, we’re ensuring customers have a robust, resilient, quality water supply. By replacing the pipes, it reduces the risks of future bursts which can cause unplanned disruption to roads and customers supplies.   

We typically measure our water mains in meters because the metric system is more widely used in engineering. Some of our water main replacement projects are stretching over 1000’s of meters and some may only be a few hundred meters in length, using just meters and kilometres keeps things consistent and is easier to understand. 

We understand that leakage can be a frustrating issue for our customers. Our team has been working hard to improve our performance and we're proud to say that we achieved our regulatory target for leakage performance over the past year. This puts us among the top performers in the industry, as only 9 out of 17 water companies were able to achieve this. However, we’re not stopping there. We’re continuing to work hard to improve and do better, particularly when it comes to our infrastructure programme. 

As mentioned, as part of our largest ever investment programme from 2025-2030 we’ll be investing in projects to help us reduce leakage, like our £406 million scheme to replace 1000km of water mains to prevent bursts. 

Read more about our plans to reduce leakage and our other performance commitments.

Delivering large-scale infrastructure investment is complicated because there are several steps and stakeholders that are involved in the process.  

For one, we work closely with local authorities to secure planning permission where required and the correct permits for any roadworks. We also work with local landowners if we require use of their land on a temporary or permanent basis – these agreements can take time.  

Much of the work we do to improve our network is conducted underground, which comes with additional complexities and safety issues – all of which need to be carefully managed to ensure the safety of our contractors, colleagues and members of the public. If we’re working in a built up or residential area we have limited working space, which means work can take longer than if it was through an open field.   

This is just a glimpse of the complexity of these infrastructure projects, and we thank our customers for their understanding and patience while we carry these out across the region. 

We understand it's frustrating to see the same roads dug up all the time. We try our best to avoid this by liaising with local highways when planning any roadwork projects. 

If there is an opportunity to collaborate with other utility services and operate under a shared traffic management system, we actively encourage and pursue it. However, due to the nature of our work, it is not always feasible to share workspace. Health and safety considerations must always remain our top priority. 

Capital schemes are funded through a combination of customer bill payments, borrowing and shareholder investment. 

Infrastructure is expensive, and borrowing is an important element when it comes to this investment. Much like a mortgage – it allows us to invest in large projects but spread the cost over the life of the asset, which ultimately means the costs are not being felt by one particular generation of customers. 

We understand that this will affect you, and we want to be transparent: customer bills will increase during this five-year investment period. This rise is necessary to help fund these improvements, which will deliver improved services to customers throughout the region. 

We write to directly affected residents about work that may impact them in their area. Details of our infrastructure, and wider investment, schemes can also be found on our social media, website, local community events and signage across the region.  

We carefully consider the times we work on our projects to make sure we keep disruption to the public to a minimum while also completing these works as quickly as possible so we’re out of the way.  

If we’re working in a residential area, we’ll try and keep our working hours to weekday/daytime working to minimise disruption to those living nearby, unless otherwise specified by the local highways authority. Where safe to do so, the team will use road plates to maintain vehicle access for residents.  

Any interruptions to supply are carried out outside of peak water usage hours such as first thing on a morning or teatime.  

If we ever have to work during peak weekend times, this is normally because the work that we’re doing is urgent or needs to be completed quickly within an outlined timeframe that has been pre-agreed with the local highways authority. 

We take a nature-first approach to our capital investments and where possible consider green-blue solutions. Unfortunately, due to space or planning constraints, these nature-based solutions are not always possible, but where they are suitable, we will favour environmentally friendly investments. 

If you have any specific questions about ongoing infrastructure investment projects local to you, please contact our Capital Customer Experience team at 0344 848 1099, quoting the reference number you’ve received at the top of your letter.