Frequently asked questions about our charges

We send you a bill. This shows all the services we provide for you and tells you how much they cost. If your services are supplied by two different companies, then whichever one of them supplies your water will bill you for both sets of services.

What if I don’t think I should pay the bill or I think my bill's not accurate?

If  you’re not responsible for paying the bill or the information on it’s not right, you need to get in touch with us within 7 days of getting your bill. We want to help make sure everything is right, but if you don’t let us know we can’t help.

This could result in us thinking you don’t want to pay and we’d have to start recovery action, county court claims and you may have to pay the legal costs. We don’t want this to happen so just give us a call.

Just remember your account performance is shared with Credit Reference Agencies.

If you rent your home it’s usually the person who lives there and uses the water who has to pay the bill.

We’ll only send the landlord the bill if they’ve let us know they’re the ones responsible for paying it.

Some of our customers have a septic tank that treats their waste water. If you’ve got one of these you could be entitled to a rebate, so give us a call on 0345 1 24 24 24 and we’ll see what we can do. If you’ve already let us know you have a septic tank then you’ll already be paying a lower sewerage charge.

As you might expect, most of our income is used to pay for the ongoing running costs of the products and services we provide. However, the good news is that a significant proportion of what’s left goes towards our whopping £3.8 billion, five-year investment program - and that’s something that’s going to deliver big benefits right across the region.

Ofwat, the water industry regulator, sets a price formula which limits increases in our revenues each year.

This takes into account inflation (the Retail Price Index) and a factor known as ‘K’, which relates to the capital investment we must make to meet UK and EU standards. The ‘K’ factor is a percentage increase or decrease for each year in a 5 year period. As a result, we’re allowed an overall increase or decrease in our revenues for each year.

This results in an average increase or decrease in our charges. The actual percentage increase or decrease in your bill may be higher or lower than this average.

Our plan is that average household bills only move in line with inflation and we plan to keep water bills as low as possible.

After listening to the views of more than 30,000 customers, we've looked at ways we can change to help in the current challenging economic climate.

As a result we’ve got a huge investment programme underway that aims to deliver major improvements to our network. This will ensure we're in a strong position to face major challenges in key areas such as population growth and climate change, and also to make sure we can continue to provide our customers with what we believe is an outstanding service. We hope you think it is too.