Reducing leakage is a priority for us
We maintain 20,000 miles of water pipes. Right now, around 24% of the water we supply is lost through leaks from our own network and customer pipes.
We know it's not acceptable to be losing so much precious water and we've got a plan to fix it. As part of our revised draft plan, we'll reduce the amount of water lost through leaks by over half by 2050, saving over 190 Ml/d of water.
Using water wisely
We’ll help our customers to reduce their water use through the on-going roll out of smart water meters, providing advice and water efficient devices for the home, alongside more innovative approaches such as new water tariffs. We’ll also work with businesses to reduce their water use.
Government has committed to bring forward new regulation and policy measures including labelling all water-using products, bringing in new standards for these products and updating building regulations for new homes.
With these measures we’re aiming to achieve water use of 110 litres per person per day on average by 2050. This ambitious scale of activity has not been achieved previously and to be successful and achieve long-term sustainable water use across the UK will require collaborative action by government, stakeholders, water companies and customers.
Smart meters
Since we started our compulsory metering programme in 2015, we've installed over 700,000 smart meters, which means over 50% of our household customers now have a meter. Our work has shown that having a meter can help customers use around 13% less water. We'll continue to roll out smart water meters to all households in our area, installing or upgrading a further 1,000,000 smart meters by 2030.
Temporary drought measures
While our revised draft plan considers a range of futures, it can't plan for all eventualities. In a future drought, we may need to temporarily restrict water use in line with the levels of service we've committed to in our Drought Plan. This may include temporary use bans (TUBs), or 'hosepipe bans', such as the one we introduced in summer 2022, plus non-essential use bans (NEUBs), which can impact businesses such as window cleaners and car washes.
Here’s the contribution of each of these measures to tackle the shortfall
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