What happens when I report a leak?
Our teams are always on standby to respond quickly to leaks – within two hours for urgent situations.
Once we’ve checked things out, we work with the local council and highways to fix it as soon as possible. Coordinating different permissions and permits can take a bit of time, but we’re always working hard to keep things moving.
Step 1: Report a leak
You can report a leak or call us if it's urgent. We’ll send an inspector out to investigate as soon as possible. We also have teams out and about in our area every day looking for leaks.
Step 2: Investigation
Our inspector visits to see what’s causing the leak.
- Urgent leaks (within 2 hours)
- When it’s affecting supply, or causing flooding or damage an inspector will be on site as soon as possible
- Serious leaks (within 24 hours)
- When it’s not affecting the supply but there’s a significant amount of water being leaked
- Less serious leaks (up to 3 days)
- All other leaks
We’ll always do our best to meet these timeframes but during busy periods we may take a little longer. When this happens, we’ll keep customers informed and be there as quickly as we can.
Step 3: Planning the repair
- Based on the investigation we plan what’s needed for the repair and schedule a date.
- If the leak is on a major road we need to apply to local authorities for permission and agree on the best way to carry out the repair safely with the least disruption.
- We’ll always do this as quickly as we can and whilst it can take up to 30 days, we can usually fix things much faster than this.
- Once we have the correct permission and permits, we can schedule the work.
Step 4: Repair
- Wherever possible our repair team will come on the scheduled day to fix the leak, but our priority is to make sure everyone has access to clean water, so we sometimes need to change plans to carry out emergency repairs. We'll let you know if the date or time changes.
- If we need to put in place road closures or temporary traffic controls, this can take a bit longer to organise.
- We won’t turn anyone’s water off unless we really need to, and we’ll always let you know before we do.
Step 5: Restore
- We’ll aim to put the area back to normal within 3 working days. This can be anything from resurfacing the road to resowing grass seeds.
- Where we are unable to put things back to normal straight away, we’ll make a temporary reinstatement. More information can be found on our Leak repair works outside your property page.
- Even if we can’t replace a specialist surface exactly like-for-like, we’ll still always provide a safe, suitable surface for the area.
- Throughout the works, we’ll make sure the area is safe while we’re working or if we need to leave the site.