Protecting rivers is a key part of Southern Water’s mission. CSO releases are made to protect homes and businesses from internal and external flooding. These releases occur because in many areas surface drains are connected into our sewer system - which is how they were constructed for many years. In heavy rain such as experienced this winter when more than 2 billion litres of water fell on Hampshire along in the first two months of the year alone, no wastewater treatment work can cope – they were not designed to handle storm water. Many of our wastewater treatment works all have storm tanks as buffers and only when these are full of the highly dilute mixture of rain and wastewater are releases permitted by the Environment Agency.
The company has lead the industry in storm spill event and duration monitoring meaning that our self-reporting of storm releases far outstrips the industry average.
We continue to invest in both monitoring and other mitigation measures.
Our bathing water enhancement programme spent £33 million in the past five years including on projects such as a £3 million storm tank tunnel in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight which will cut the number of storm releases by an estimated 33 per cent.
In some areas especially prone to sewer flooding we have taken the expensive and disruptive step of physically separating combined sewers and surface water drains. In one small part of Portsmouth this was a £50 million project. This makes it clear that digging up thousands of streets and roads would cost many billions and cause massive disruption and would not be acceptable to our customers or to regulators.
In the last 12 months a further 111 monitors were added to overflows to further enhance our monitoring. We have now virtually completed installing monitoring across our storm over flows and by March 2021 we will be reporting virtually every event to the EA.
We are also leading the industry in transparency – automated emails informing key stakeholders including environmental groups are sent for each potential event and a dedicated web pages keeps customers and stakeholders informed about our environmental performance.
Catchment Management is a key part of our approach to managing habitats and water resources We work in partnership with wildlife trusts and other bodies and do indeed create wetlands to slow the movement of water, most recently on the Isle of Wight.
Southern Water is still a company in transformation but regulators and customers increasingly recognise our improving performance.
Notes:
Our dividend record is that since 2010 we have paid out £190 million to external shareholders while spending more than £6 billion to build and maintain assets and provide services to customers. Our dividend policy ties the payment of any dividend to strict criteria not limited to financial resilience but also to outcomes for customers. No external dividend has been paid since 2017.
Like any capital intensive company borrowing is used to finance the construction and maintenance of assets. Our gearing (debt/equity ratio) meets the Ofwat criteria.