Northumbrian Water has gone out to tender with a major AMP8 contract for Household Water Saving Retrofit Audits across its Northern, Essex and Suffolk supply areas.

The water company has set itself challenging targets to achieve real and quantifiable water savings through its water efficiency strategy to reach a long-term goal of 110 litres per person per day by 2050 and a 9.7% reduction between 2025 and 2030.

Northumbrian Water says water saving visits have been a key component of its water efficiency strategy, describing it as a tried and tested approach which successfully combines the provision and fitting of water saving products in customer's homes and effective water efficiency education with each customer. According to the utility this approach has proven to deliver long-term behaviour change.

Northumbrian Water is now seeking to employ a contractor to deliver its Water's Worth Saving household retrofit water saving visit project.to its highest use customers across its Northern, Essex and Suffolk supply areas for the whole of AMP8 (2025 - 2030).

The water company is aiming to award the contract to a contractor that can demonstrate a wide range of facets required to successfully deliver the project for 2025 - 2027, with extensions up to and including 2030.

Services to be provided under the wide-ranging scope of the contract include:

• Inbound and outbound call handling
• Arranging appointments, including rescheduling
• Organise/plan technician routes/diaries around appointments,
• Organise/facilitate the transfer, storage and monitoring of stock
• Gaining an understanding of customers, who they are and how/why/when water is used the way it is
• Engaging with customer through relevant behavioural change messaging, making the interaction personal and tailored to the customer
• Delivery and installation of suitable water saving interventions, taking flow measurements, and substituting alternative products
• Minor internal leak repairs (such as leaking toilets, tap washer replacements etc.)
• Robust and quality assured data collection, for example collecting data from visit around products installed, meter reads, any other areas of interest, on an electronic form
• Reporting, for example a weekly report of work complete, a monthly overview, and a final project review report
• Collection of water consumption data to assess water savings
• Post intervention customer survey
• Post interventions follow up to customers,
• Regular catch ups with the project team to cover aspects such as training, project progress and any support required.

The objective is to provide validated data on the details of the work completed annually so that this data can be analysed and used for NWG's annual reporting for the regulatory year which runs from April to March The project for the first year of the contract will be completed by January 2026 including a period for review of the final report and database by NWG, followed by any required amendments and clarification.

The appointed contractor must be able to deliver the work across all three operating areas (Northern, Essex and Suffolk supply areas) throughout the duration of the contract.

Time limit for receipt of tenders or requests to participate is15 April 2024 at 12 noon. Expressions of interest for the tender must be sent via e-mail before the deadline date of 15th April 2024.

Click here to access the tender documentation.