Annual financial results Yorkshire Water

Nicola Shaw, CEO from Yorkshire Water said: “Last year we stated a firm commitment to being transparent about how we’re performing, where we need to improve, and what we’re doing to deliver for our customers and the environment in Yorkshire – this Full Year results statement is an indication of how we are committed to communicating openly with our customers and stakeholders. 

“Over the financial year 2026, we served 5.5m individual customers every day, in 2.4m homes and 146,000 businesses whilst dealing with drought conditions for six months of the period, followed by the wettest three months since 1871, which has been challenging to say the least. We had some clear successes – showing our work is making a real difference – and ended the year with a more resilient water network, thanks to the rapid investment we completed. At the same time, we delivered improved water quality, reductions in leakage and external sewer flooding, investment in new water supplies and an impressive water mains replacement programme. Nonetheless, there remains a huge amount of work to do to get to where we want to be.  

“In response to this we are investing more than ever before with £8.3 billion of investment over the next five years. Many of the projects we are undertaking to improve services are multi-year projects, which take time to deliver, but we remain focused on meeting the expectations of our customers and other stakeholders. I am confident we have the right strategy and investment plans in place to keep delivering real benefits for our customers and the environment here in Yorkshire.” 

Operational highlights: Focused on delivering great value for customers, improving the environment around us, and being an inspiring and motivating place to work 

Financial highlights 

Outlook 

Our Performance: Where we are investing and delivering 

This year kicked off our first year of AMP8, which was one of exceptional weather, with drought declared over 2025 to be followed by the wettest few months we have experienced in Yorkshire since 1871. These extremes created some major challenges for us and our stakeholders, and we took a number of actions to mitigate the risk to our customers – however we were pleased to have a more resilient water network compared to the 2022 drought. Overall there is no doubt we have seen progress in a number of key areas, but pollution and customer satisfaction remain the big opportunities for improvement.  

We are committed to delivering for our customers and for Yorkshire and we’re making the biggest investment in our history – £8.3 billion between 2025 and 2030 – to improve our service to customers, reduce pollution and leakages, maintain high-quality drinking water, protect rivers and coasts and make significant upgrades to our water and wastewater infrastructure.  

This will take time given the scale of new infrastructure and complexity of the task but this year we have made progress with 23% of our 5-year AMP programme already on site being delivered, 88 projects completed and 89% of projects already in design stage, with over 1,500 projects either being designed, built or completed. This strong start to our five-year programme will deliver early benefits for customers and the environment, and drive improvements in our performance through the next five years. 

In 2026 we made significant investments across Yorkshire, completing 88 investment projects across the region and starting many more. 44 of those projects were to replace water mains across the region – totalling c.175km of pipework, exceeding our target for the year and achieving more than twice the length of mains replaced in the whole of the previous five years. This performance was supported by surpassing our targets on smart meter upgrades, focusing on pressure control valve installation, new technology and smart network installations to reduce water loss and a very strong performance from our expanded leakage team to reduce the time it takes to find and fix leaks. 

Other investments were to replace sewers, reduce discharges of untreated wastewater through increased storage and increased treatment capacity, reduce the amount of phosphorus entering local watercourses, improve reservoir safety, and starting the work to install new boreholes in Malton, Brayton and East Ness – key to providing a more resilient and reliable water supply. 

Our Performance: Where we are focused on improving   

Pollution: We reported last year that we were taking significant steps to improve our pollution performance. Our progress this year has not been as we had hoped, with more total pollution incidents than in the prior year, and the same number of serious incidents. Performance challenges were compounded by extreme weather conditions, including a prolonged period of drought and several named storms. The drought created significant issues for our smaller wastewater treatment works, which typically serve rural communities of fewer than 250 people and often discharge into small watercourses. Reduced flows in these watercourses, which often become dry ditches during drought conditions, mean that even routine discharges have a greater environmental impact than usual because there is less rainwater to dilute the discharge. This resulted therefore in a greater number of pollution incidents. 

One of the important ways we’re making sure we can reduce pollution is by improving our data and understanding of our network. We’re continuing to increase our use of operational intelligence, which uses data from our monitors and AI to predict and prevent pollution before it occurs. 

Customer Service: We continue to focus on improving the experience our customers have with us. However, with bills increasing in April 2025 by 30% on average, followed by hosepipe restrictions in July, customer sentiment dropped and impacted performance. We have worked hard to improve performance for customers and have invested £8m to improve service. This plan focuses on improving end-to-end ownership through each customer’s experience with us and increasing the number of colleagues in customer facing roles so we can resolve issues quicker and keep customers updated. We also introduced ‘second voice’ which provides customers with an additional escalation if they feel their interaction with us has not been handled how they’d like it to have been.  

Our focus for this year is to build on tactical gains while transitioning towards sustainable, strategic solutions such as digital self-serve, automation, improved customer interactions, WhatsApp and interactive voice response enhancements, and end-to-end system transformation.   

We know that the cost of living continues to be a challenge for our customers, and with water bills continuing to rise to fund vital investment, we want to make sure we’re providing the right support for those who need it. Over the last year, we’ve helped an additional 55,000 customers with their bills, meaning we helped 246,000 customers with £70m worth of support. We have also added 80,000 more customers on to our priority services register so we can tailor the service they receive to better reflect their needs. 

For full details on Yorkshire Water’s operational and financial performance for FY2026, please visit Yorkshire Water, Annual Report and Financial Statements, for the year ended 31 March 2026, published July 2026.