42 Do we trust water companies?

A couple of weeks ago the results of a survey of customers views of UK water companies was published.?You can find it here.?It was published by Ofwat, the body that regulates the income and expenditure of the companies.?The survey was of a demographically representative sample of 2?016 people.

Ofwat now carries out this survey at intervals throughout the year and this was the third that they had carried out.

There are a few key points from the survey that I found interesting:

• Water companies are not trusted and it is getting worse.
• The public do not really understand the issues facing the water sector and the environment.
• Ofwat doesn’t show that it really understands the issues facing the water sector and the environment.
• Water company messaging is not getting through to the public.
• Water companies need to demonstrate their ambition to improve.

Deterioration in trust

Customers were asked whether they trusted water companies to deliver on a range of aspects of their service.?Extra topics have been introduced in the more recent surveys, largely driven by the current concern over overflow discharges.?The results for this basic question on trust are shown in the graph below (note, I have paraphrased the wording of the topics for brevity).

Key lessons from this are:

• It has been a bad year for water companies.?Trust in them has deteriorated significantly.
• The reduction in trust has been led by issues relating to overflow discharges and the environment
• That seems to be contagious to other aspects of their service with some reduction in trust across the board including fixing leaks and providing value for money.

The companies need to respond with positive messages before trust is eroded so completely that what they say is not believed.

Impacts on rivers

The second interesting area of the survey was a specific question of what customers thought had the worst impact on rivers.?The results are shown in the graph below (again, I have paraphrased the issues).

Perhaps not surprisingly given the massive publicity that the topic has received, the public think that the worst impact on rivers is the discharge of untreated sewage from overflows.

We can compare this with the assessment by the Environment Agency (EA) of what are the worst impacts on rivers.?This is published in a spreadsheet of Reasons for Not Achieving Good quality (RNAG) that is published every six years as part of the framework for River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs).?The latest version that I could find (here) was published in 2020 but appears to use data from 2015. Note that:

• The data from the Ofwat survey covers both England and Wales, whereas the RNAG data only covers England.
• RNAG does not yet have data on microplastics.

The RNAG spreadsheet contains 15?301 entries covering all of the rivers in England.?There is a lot of detail as to which parameters are failing their targets, the sector causing the impact and the type of activity causing the impact.?A summary is shown in the graph below with the water industry activities in orange.?Again I have simplified the wording.

So the public have a big misconception of the impact of the water industry on river conditions.?Untreated sewage, which they put at the top of their list, is actually responsible for only 3% of the problems.?The biggest water industry impact is actually from treated sewage effluent; primarily phosphate and nitrate nutrients that encourage algal and weed growth.

Of even greater concern to me than the lack of understanding by the public is the lack of understanding exhibited by Ofwat in drawing up the list of multi-choice topics for the public to choose from.

• Treated sewage effluent is not mentioned.?Is this because they want to protect the water companies by not acknowledging that it is an issue, or more likely that they are reflecting back to the public what the public already thinks.
• They use the term “farm waste” rather than “agricultural and rural pollution”.?Most impact from agriculture is due to runoff of contaminants from fields rather than the discharge of waste.?Agricultural pollution as a whole is the biggest cause of rivers not achieving good quality.?Were they trying to downplay the role that this has?

Perhaps in future surveys Ofwat should present the RNAG data to the public and ask if they accept that it is correct.?It would also be good to see the EA correcting the record more forcefully.

Communicating with the public

Some hints as to what the water companies (and their regulators) need to do to rebut the misconceptions and to increase public trust in the water companies comes from the survey questions about perception of existing messages from the water companies.

One question asked what messaging the public remembered having seen from the water companies.?Again I assume that this was a multiple-choice question with the options pre-selected for the public to choose from.?The results are shown in the graph below.

It is good news that the messaging about saving water is getting through to customers. Let’s hope that they are acting on it.?But there are a lot of topics that is covered by water company messaging that were not asked.?What about:

• Fatberg campaigns, which are probably the biggest part of water company messaging.
• How to report a leak that you spot.
• The importance of disconnecting surface water with water butts or raingardens.
• Company activity to repair burst water mains.
• Overflow alerts affecting bathing and recreation waters.
• Drainage and wastewater management plans.

It is good that 15% of people are aware of the work that water companies are doing to improve rivers, but a follow up question showed that 47% of people would like to hear more on this topic with only 3% wanting to hear less.?

So the one chink of good news is that they public would like to know more good news about what the water companies are doing.?It is now up to the companies supported by their regulators to respond to this invitation.

Ambition and complacency

The final set of questions that I would like to discuss is on the public impression of water company attitudes.?Again, they were presented with a pre-selected list of options to choose from and many of these were polar opposites; for example “competent” and “incompetent”.?Where this is the case I have shown the responses as two extremes of the graph.?For other topics there wasn’t an opposite choice and I have just shown one extreme.

My interpretation of the results is shown in the graph below.

For me, the most damning criticism is that only 9% of the public think that the water companies are ambitious with 19% thinking that they are complacent.?I do not think that is a fair picture of the people that I know working for water companies, so again there is an open door to present a new message on long term ambitions and how to achieve them.

The long-term Water Resource Management Plans and Drainage and Wastewater Management Plans provides the framework for this, but how many customers have even heard of them?