Water industry regulator Ofwat has written to the water companies to say it will provide full transparency when it publishs its draft determination decisions on the business plans for the upcoming 2015-20 AMP6 investment programme on Friday.

Ofwat agreed only one area of redaction, where commercially sensitive information would be removed, before publishing the outcome of its risk based review.

In a letter to the water companies on 22nd August, Ofwat said:

“In our view, full transparency with companies and our broader stakeholders significantly facilitates the performance of our functions, in particular as regards acting in the interests of consumers, and need to balance any redaction requests against that.”

Ofwat said that in order for it to accept redaction requests on commercial confidentiality grounds the companies would need to show:

• a causal link between the publication of the information and consumer harm;
• what that harm is likely to be;
•  the scale of the harm.

Ofwat said it will then balance these against the benefits to consumers that it considers arise from being fully transparent and decide whether to publish. In the absence of these it would be unable to carry out this balancing exercise. The regulator’s default position is that it will publish because of the benefits to consumers that brings.

Deadline for the water companies  to submit requests for redaction closed yesterday.

The water companies will have until 3 October to make representations on Ofwat’s  draft determinations following Friday’s publication. These will be placed in the public domain, together with any other representations Ofwat receives.