Water2business, the joint venture set up by Wessex Water and Bristol Water to provide water management solutions to businesses across the UK, has applied to Ofwat for a retail licence under section 17A of the Water Industry Act 1991.

The two water companies join a number of other utilities who have already established separate stand-alone businesses to take advantage of new opportunities when  the market for non-household opens up to retail competition in April 2017.

The Open Water Programme consultation on its proposed Market Blueprint for retail competition in water and sewerage services closed last month. Retail competition will mean that business, charity and public sector water customers in England will be able to switch their water and sewerage supplier from 2017. The Blueprint’s key aims include incentivising innovation by both existing and new market participants to deliver the best service for customers.

One of the proposals included in the Blueprint is that the retail market’s market operator will host and maintain a central register of the contestable market in order to enable centralised switching.

However, while market participants should all have access to this central register detailing the contestable market, it is not proposed that customers should also be able to access the register directly. Instead, they will need to contact a market participant to enquire about or take up their ability to switch and to access data about the services their premises receive.

The Open Water programme is planning to prototype and pilot the development of the register with a sample of companies, so that it can be developed and made available in advance of market opening.

The Blueprint has proposed that the base unit for all registration and switching activity should be service type, representing each service type at premises level, e.g. potable water, non-potable water, sewerage, surface water drainage, trade effluent.

Customer should be able to choose to have different retailers for each service type, but with three potential of bundling options:

grouped service level (i.e. water or sewerage services)

premises level

customer level (i.e. comprising a portfolio of premises).

All retail suppliers in the marketplace will be expected to offer this bundling as a service to customers.

Customers will in turn have to meet the following two requirements before they are able to switch their retailer.

To be eligible, the service they wish to switch will have to be being supplied to a non-household premises located in the area of appointment of an undertaker operating wholly or mainly in England.

The customer requesting the switch should also be being directly served and billed by the current retailer– that is, the service is not subject to a private re-selling arrangement where the end-user is paying somebody else who in turn pays the retailer.

The Blueprint has also proposed that should be a centralised marketing campaign ahead of competition to raise customers’ awareness of switching, complemented by retailers’ own direct marketing activities.

However, the campaign should not be delivered by the market operator, it should instead be “enabled” by Ofwat and involve a range of organisations, including retailers (both new entrants and incumbents); and customer representative bodies such as the Consumer Council for Water.