Cymraeg
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Reliable, high quality water supply

Reliable, high quality water for drinking and for household or business use is essential for daily life and a core part of our mission. We take a ‘source to tap’ approach to ensuring tap water is great quality every day, covering everything from the uplands where rainwater falls, to the pipes taking water into customer properties.

The safety and quality of tap water is closely monitored and enforced by the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) so that customers can have full trust and confidence in the water that comes out of the tap.

To help ensure the best drinking water quality, we will tackle:

Reliability: Customers should be able to rely on water being available whenever they need it, now and in the future. Short-term supply interruptions can be a major inconvenience when they do occur. When mains burst and supplies are affected, we work hard to get customers’ water supply back as quickly as possible, while making bottled water available and delivering it to vulnerable customers.

Discolouration: Our performance on tap water discolouration incidents continues to present a challenge. We get proportionately more contacts from customers on this issue than other companies. This is a complex issue, related to the changing quality of raw water in our reservoirs, high flows in the network in dry periods, and the interaction of compounds in the water with pipe materials. Sustained improvement is not achievable without an acceleration of the replacement of old water mains made of cast iron. In the next five years we will invest £150 million to replace some 100 kilometres of cast iron mains with modern pipe materials.

Lead: Quality at the tap is also affected by the water supply pipes on customers’ properties that are owned by them. While these are not water company responsibility, we have the expertise and capability to support an effort to address the damaging legacy of lead water supply pipes. In 2025-2030 we will continue to replace customers’ lead supply pipes for free.

We will:
  • Invest an extra £66 million in water mains replacement, focusing on asbestos cement (AC) mains. These pipe materials are bursting more and more frequently, due to a range of factors including age and ground conditions. AC is the primary pipe material in west Wales which suffers disproportionately from supply interruptions due to mains burst
  • Bring our tap water quality compliance (CRI) score back into line with the rest of the industry
  • Reduce the number of “acceptability of water” contacts from 1.75 per 1,000 customers (forecast) in 2025 to 1.0 in 2030
  • Replace 7,500 lead pipes between customer properties and our network to safeguard health and support Welsh Government aspiration for a 'lead-free Wales'
  • Reduce by 24% the leakage in our network, and help customers address leaks in their homes and businesses
  • Work with customers to bring down household consumption per capita by 7% by 2030
  • Accelerate our long-term metering programme, which will provide better data on water use for customers, without moving to compulsory metering. By 2030 we aim to have 78% of our household customers on meters
  • Invest £66 million to replace 174 kilometers ageing asbestos cement mains pipes
  • Invest £51 million to connect supply zones, building more resilience against the increasing background risk of low probability, high risk incidents that threaten supplies
  • Continue with our long-term dam maintenance and upgrades programme. The upgrades programme increases safety of 29 priority dams at a cost of £79 million
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Reliable wastewater service reducing impact on the environment

Our sewerage systems collect domestic wastewater from drainage outlets around your home and carry it through a network of underground pipes to our treatment works. Here the effluent is cleaned and returned to the environment.

On the wastewater side our primary challenge for the long-term is the impact of Storm Overflows and nutrient discharges from wastewater treatment works on river ecology. Much of this is covered in the environmental section of the website.

The Business Plan has been developed to clearly take full account of the expectations of regulators and stakeholders, including customers, in preparing the right long-term plan to address this issue in a way that is effective and affordable.

We will:
  • Our ultimate intent is to remove all ecological harm caused by Storm Overflows (SOs) by 2040
  • In 2022 the Environmental Performance Assessment (EPA) for the company issued by NRW and the EA meant that we dropped to a 2-star rating, our aim is to routinely achieve a 4-star EPA rating in AMP8
  • Work with farmers and other land managers in upland catchments to prevent deterioration of raw water entering our reservoirs
  • Pursue further research with our academic partners (including Cardiff and Aberystwyth Universities, and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) to better understand the change in raw water quality over time, its causes and triggers, and how we can meet this challenge through better forecasting and treatment processes
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Infrastructure Improvements

Maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure is vitally important if we are to improve the service we provide for our customers and protect the environment.

This is why we are investing in our drinking water network, so that we can improve key areas of performance on leakage, interruption to water supplies and drinking water quality.

We have identified locations where the water network needs to be upgraded and have a programme of works is underway in urban and rural areas of Monmouth, Cardiff, Llyswen near Brecon, Rassau, Ebbw Vale. This programme is about to move into the Vale of Glamorgan, Barry and Newport West.

Work will also be done on aging asbestos cement water mains, particularly in west Wales.

As part of our work to improve river water quality, we have invested to upgrade our wastewater treatment works across our area.

This comprehensive programme is already cutting the levels of phosphorous that is discharged from our sites into our rivers.

Climate change is also central to our dam safety investment, where storm and rainfall intensity mean that we need to upgrade these important assets to deal with more challenging operating conditions.

We will:
  • Improve water quality through our extensive treated water storage tank refurbishment programme, targeted mains replacement and improved network maintenance activities
  • Complete the £45 million investment to upgrade the valves and the spillway capacity at Llyn Celyn reservoir to upgrade its storm reliance
  • Invest a further £10 million on work to clean and refurbish service reservoirs across our operating area
  • Improve the planned maintenance at our Waste Water Treatment Works Compliance to reduce equipment failure
  • Complete work on a £13 million Nature-Based Solution that treats discharges from a SO in New Inn, near Pontypool. It will treat discharges before releasing it to the Afon Llwyd, achieving ‘No Impact’ on the local environment
  • Invest £10 million on fixing large complex leaks on our trunk mains, and installing meters, and insertion points on the network to enable us to use innovative in-pipe leak detection techniques. We are also investing an additional £59 million between 2023 and 2025 on leak detection and repair on the wider water distribution network
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Resilience and Security

Everything we do is to ensure the quality of service to customers and prevent harm to the environment. When things go wrong, we aim to recover quickly and put things right. The resilience of our operational activity is vitally important, as is our financial and corporate resilience. We are increasingly concerned with preventing and planning for low probability high-impact threats, particularly where risk levels are increasing over time.

Flooding: Our plan for 2025-30 is part of a long-term programme to managing these risks and remaining resilient, with a particular focus on climate change adaptation. We have seen a number of major flooding events in Wales over the last few years, notably Storm Dennis in February 2020 and Storm Christoph in January 2021, and most recently Storm Bert and Darragh in 2024. We successfully minimised the impact on services to customers and will invest £5 million before 2030 to protect critical water treatment works from flooding and embark on a longer-term programme for flood protection of wastewater treatment works beyond 2030.

We will:
  • Invest £157 million to strengthen the resilience of the water supply system
  • Invest £131 million to reduce the background risk of serious pollution incidents
  • Invest £23 million to upgrade security at our sites
  • Invest £5 million by 2030 to protect all critical water treatment works from 1 in 30-year storm flooding
  • Prepare a long-term programme of investment to protect wastewater treatment works from flooding as the climate changes
  • Continue to refine and develop our Resilience Framework

Cybersecurity attacks are another growing threat. We are an Operator of Essential Services and are required to meet regulations on cybersecurity. We will continue to invest to manage this risk and protect customer data. We will improve our threat detection and response capabilities, with £11 million available to enhance security measures against cyberattacks.