Southern Water has announced a comprehensive plan that demonstrates its commitment to reducing pollution incidents and helping to improve the environment.

“We’re one of the first organisations in the sector to have analysed the challenge in detail and developed a plan like this - and we’re proud of it,” said Dr Nick Mills, Head of Pollution and Flooding Resilience at Southern Water. “It’s based on extensive data analysis and industry best practice. Our plan of activities aims to deliver zero pollution incidents by 2040.

“We’re very much a company in transformation and have undergone significant cultural changes. This has affected our reported performance in 2019 and the size of the challenge ahead of us. We are confident this plan and future iterations of it will allow us to reduce the number of pollutions incidents.”

The detailed plan has been shared with Defra and the Environment Agency. 

The Pollution Incident Reduction Plan forms part of a wider initiative called Environment+, which focuses on people, processes and systems to deliver a water resilient future for the Southern Water region by protecting the natural environment and customers’ properties.

There are four themes key to the success of the Pollution Incident Reduction Plan

• Staff and Customer Participation
• Improving the Resilience of Assets and Processes
• Trusted Monitoring and Analysis
• Smart Networks/Fast and Effective Responses.

Activities to to date resolve specific issues include:

• awareness and training
• enhancing site resilience to power failure and electrical faults
• improving pump reliability, customer behaviour programmes to reduce blockages caused by sewer misuse
• alarm transformation
• enhanced rotas for the regional control centre (RCC)
• an RCC transformation programme and improved root cause analysis (RCA)

Since Southern Water Chief Executive Ian McAulay joined the organisation in 2017, the company has seen wholesale changes to people, processes and systems, including:

• A complete restructure of the Executive Team and additions to the Board with strengthened governance
• Invested £26m in wastewater sites over the past year
• Five year plan overspend funded by shareholders of £150m to transform the business
• Appointment of a Director of Risk and Compliance to challenge front-line teams
• Enhanced compliance across all wastewater treatment works including compulsory compliance and Code of Ethics training for all relevant colleagues.
• Refreshed company vision, values and purpose which support and align to a modern compliance framework.
• More than £100m invested in IT systems and processes.

Introducing the newly-published pollution plan, Southern Water Chief Executive Ian McAulay said:

“We very clearly understand that in the past Southern Water did not deliver a service that fully prioritised the environment. The pollution incident reduction plan is another indication of our determination to put this right”.

He added:

“However we are not complacent, we know there is more to do and my team, the Board and I are fully committed to continuing to improve our business and deliver the services our customers deserve while fulfilling our purpose to protect and improve the environment upon which we all rely.”

Click here to download Southern Water's Pollution Incident Reduction Plan