Ian McAulay, CEO of Southern Water, has expressed the company’s disappointment with its fall in the ratings in the Environment Agency’s annual report on the environmental performance of the nine water and sewerage companies in England released this week.

The EA report shows four out of the nine companies are falling short of expected standards – Anglian, Northumbrian and South West Water and Southern Water. Southern Water is the first company to be rated as 1 star (poor) since 2015.

Commenting on the report’s findings, Ian McAulay said:

“As would rightly be expected we are extremely disappointed to have fallen in the ratings awarded in this year’s Environmental Performance Assessment. We are already taking bold steps to set our pollution record straight.

"We invested an additional £3.2 million during 2019–20 to improve our ability to find and fix leaks alongside an additional £54 million to improve pollution performance.

“Southern Water is a company in transformation and last month we announced our Pollution Incident Reduction Plan, which was shared with the Environment Agency following months of work. We are one of the first organisations in the sector to have analysed the challenge in detail and developed a plan around it. It sets out a plan to reduce pollution incidents to 80 per year by 2025, and zero pollution incidents by 2040.

“We are also fully confident this plan and future iterations will allow us to reduce the number of pollutions incidents in the imminent future.”

The detailed Pollution Incident Reduction Plan has been shared with Defra and the Environment Agency.

Southern Water said it is “substantially different” today and has already made a number of fundamental improvements which have been recognised by the regulators including:

• A restructure of the Executive Team and Board
• Invested £26 million in wastewater sites over the past year.
• Meeting our obligations to customers head on, including recompensing them for omissions and unacceptable behaviours, and complying with undertakings given to regulators
• Southern Water has fully supported these investigations and has simultaneously completed its own extensive internal review, which highlighted failures of people, processes and systems during that period.
• Appointment of a Director of Risk and Compliance to challenge front-line teams
• Introduction of an industry-standard ‘three lines of defence’ model for regulatory reporting
• Increased reporting to Ofwat for greater scrutiny
• Strengthened whistle-blowing policies and appointed an independent adjudicator so that any colleague with concerns feels confident that they will be listened to
• 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 £100 million invested in IT systems and processes.