Water is a vital public service and plays a critical role in the wellbeing of people and the natural environment and enabling a prosperous society to flourish. With a growing population, pollution levels increasing and a changing climate, there has never been a more important time to continue engagement with our customers and wider stakeholders.

To put in place robust plans to overcome these challenges, it is vital to fully understand the things that are most important to our customers and wider stakeholders now, and in the future and how these are changing over time.

Over the period of 2020 to 2023, we have made a further step-change in the quality and reach of our research and wider engagement. We have talked and listened to over 60,000 customers and many more stakeholder voices and used news ways to work directly with them to shape our plans.

During this period, we have delivered over 30 customer insight & research projects and drawn from a range of reports available across the water and wider sectors that. We have also improved the framework we use to evaluate the insights and how they differ between different voices, which has provided us with a rich evidence base on which to make our decisions. We used all of this valuable feedback to help us put together our 2025 to 2030 business plan , and beyond to 2050 ensuring we are taking balanced and fair decisions for all our customers and wider stakeholders.

Our research and wider engagement programme covers a diverse range of methodologies, such as large-scale online surveys and in-depth conversations through on-to-one chats to focus groups and discussion forums. This helps us to understand, directly from customers, what matters most to them using approaches in ways that best suited them to engage with us.

You can find out more by using the links below about the engagement undertaken, what we learnt and how we used the feedback. Within these pages, we have published our research reports and supporting papers. You can also read about some of the ways that we continue to engage with hundreds of customers each year to ensure the conversation never stops.

Your water, your say - Open challenge sessions

The ‘Your water, your say’ online meeting is an opportunity to ask questions about a range of topics directly to our senior directors. Your questions could cover a range of areas including our impact on the environment, the service we provide, keeping bills affordable and any topic that is important to you. The events will be hosted by an Independent Chair, appointed by our regulator Ofwat and the Consumer Council for Water (CCW). Our first session was held in June 2023 and we would like to invite you to join our second ‘Your water, your say’ session in November. You can find more here about this opportunity to have your say on our proposed plan for 2025-2030.

Ensuring our engagement is high quality and independently run

It was important that we delivered a “high-quality” research and engagement programme that our customers can trust. To enable this, we worked with eight independent research agencies to deliver our research and insight programme. Their role is to ensure an unbiased and accurate view of our customers preferences is provided. You can find out more about our research partners here.

We will continue to commission new research to explore areas that are most important to shaping our plans and these will be uploaded, when published, to this section of our website.

At every step of the journey, our independent Stakeholder Panel has checked that we were carrying out the research in an open and fair way, and that we were listening to customers and wider stakeholders and responding appropriately to what they were telling us. You can find out more about the Panel and review its independent report on how we approached our engagement journey here.