In a ground breaking initiative, Dee Valley Water recently held a community event that brought together 28 organisations with the aim of exploring opportunities for collaboration to better support vulnerable customers.

The water utility, which supplies water only to more than 258,000 people in northeast Wales and west Cheshire, is the smallest water company in the UK, but realised that they could make a big difference by being proactive in the development of an integrated network of support organisations.

Dee Valley worked with stakeholder engagement experts Impact Utilities to organise the event, which drew in over forty delegates from medical, age-support, and other charities; local and regional authorities; the Consumer Council for Water (CCWater); and a wide range of other organisations that provide services for supporting customers in situations of vulnerability.

The event took the form of presentations by Dee Valley and guest speakers with roundtable discussions and a panel Q&A session. Guest speakers included Julia Cherrett from Dwr Cymru Welsh Water; Claire Kelly from Newlife Foundation, a charity helping disabled and terminally ill children; Michael Hogg from Keep Me Posted, a coalition of representatives from charities, interest groups and business; and David Walker from Groundwork Green Doctor, an environmental and social regeneration charity.

The roundtable discussions started by considering how “vulnerability” should be defined, and covered the difference between vulnerability and affordability; reasons for vulnerability; the fact that people can be vulnerable for multiple reasons, and move in and out of vulnerability; and that vulnerability is a situation rather than a personal characteristic.

Building on Ofwat’s Vulnerability focus report, delegates concluded that it’s important to understand how customers can find themselves in vulnerable circumstances.

Moving on from the recognition that there is no “cohort” of vulnerable customers to the challenges of supporting them, Wendy Jones, Dee Valley’s Head of Customer Service, explained:

"One of the biggest challenges we face… is finding those that that really need our help”.

There was general agreement on the need to raise awareness of the services offered in order to enhance access to them, find new ways to connect customers to support available, and refer customers to each other’s channels.

The Customer Support team at Dee Valley have recently undergone training from both Stepchange and the Citizens Advice Bureau on how to help them identify signs of vulnerability and how it can work with them to refer or recommend customers that would benefit from their support and services.

Dee Valley has also committed to taking a leading role in creating a customer challenge panel which will produce newsletters and run similar stakeholder events to build and maintain the profile of available services amongst partner organisations.

It will also be a hub for referrals and for distributing literature to organisations as well as customers.

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