Ofwat has today confirmed Thames Water’s agreement to pay a package worth £86 million to customers and the communities it serves, following Ofwat’s investigation into the company’s misreporting of sewer flooding data in 2010.
Ofwat’s investigation related to Thames misreporting the number of properties at high risk of sewer flooding between 2005 and 2010 which meant that more properties were recorded as at high risk of sewer flooding than there was evidence to support.
The regulator said that while the misreporting may have led to poorly targeted and inefficient spending of customers’ money, there was no evidence of deliberate misreporting. Following the investigation Ofwat said it was satisfied that Thames’s approach did not put any homes at risk of sewer flooding and that its programme did reduce the risk of sewer flooding at the homes of a large number of its customers. It also recognised that between 2005 and 2010 the company spent an additional £20 million of its own money to help deal with sewer flooding problems which did not come out of customers’ bills.
Thames has committed to accepting a reduction in its regulatory capital value (RCV) of £79 million, which will benefit customers for years to come. The RCV is a regulatory accounting figure which includes the asset costs and investment that has been put into the water company. By reducing the RCV , which is used for setting bills, bills will be lower.
Thames will also give back £7 million to customers and the community by:
- putting an additional £2 million into its independently managed Thames Water Trust Fund, to assist customers who are having difficulty paying their bills; and
- investing £5 million to support additional community projects such as local programmes to better protect rivers and improve the natural environment.
The water industry regulator has also published a notice imposing a nominal penalty of £1 on Thames Water after consulting on this action in June 2014.
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