Yorkshire Water Services Limited asks Ofwat to refer its final determination to the competition and markets authority

Yorkshire Water announces today (10 February 2020) that it will not accept the final determination published by Ofwat on 16 December 2019 as part of its 2019 price review. It has instead asked Ofwat to refer its final determination to the Competition and Markets Authority for review.

Significant work has been undertaken to establish the deliverability of the final determination and the levels of risk to which it will expose the company. The company has concluded that the long term risks to its resilience and customers would be at a level which it cannot accept.

The overall approach to the determination, including as it does poorly designed penalty measures over the next five years means that the company would be forced to focus on short term performance at the expense of longer term capital investment, vital for securing resilience of critical water and waste water infrastructure in Yorkshire.

Commenting on the decision, Yorkshire Water chief executive officer Liz Barber said: “Everyone at Yorkshire Water shares a common purpose to provide safe and reliable services to our customers and our county, long into the future. We’re naturally committed to being the most efficient company we can, but have decided that accepting this determination would jeopardise Yorkshire’s resilience and our own.”