What is a draft determination?
In October 2023 we submitted our business plan for 2025-30 to our regulator, Ofwat, for scrutiny and assessment. The plan proposed levels of investment to maintain and enhance services to both customers and the environment.
In July 2024 Ofwat published its provisional assessment of our business plan, known as its draft determination. This set out its view on all aspects of the plan, including required levels of investment, the performance that it expects from this investment, and the associated level of customer bills.
Our response
We have published our response to Ofwat’s draft determination. This is the next step in Ofwat’s five-yearly price review process.
At draft determination, Ofwat challenged our plan and proposed that bills should reduce by 2% over the five-year period. Our response reiterates the need for significant investment, much of which is to meet obligations set by regulators, and if approved will see bills rise by 29% over the next five years, incrementally – not in one go. Next year’s bills will increase by approximately 9% and in real terms, bills will still be lower in 2030 than in 2010. Our plan does not include any investment that has already been funded and we are not asking customers to pay twice.
However, for any customers who struggle to pay we will continue to offer a range of low-rate tariffs and plan to grow the total numbers we support. We believe nobody should spend more than 5% of their disposable household income on their water bill and are committed to eradicating water poverty by 2030.
Our plan proposes £3.65 billion of new investment to upgrade infrastructure, protect the environment, safeguard future water supplies and create local jobs, including:
- £1.13bn invested to improve water quality by removal of 1,550 tonnes of nutrients in our waterways
- £445m to reduce the operation of storm overflows. This is more than double the £3m a month we are currently spending
- Innovative use of sewer monitors to predict problems in the network, real-time water quality monitoring for bathing waters and nature-based treatment solutions including floating reedbeds
- The doubling of investment will create an additional 700 jobs at Wessex Water, with thousands more in the supply chain
Ofwat will now review our revised plan and make a final decision no earlier than December.
Read a summary of changes to our plan or find our full response to Ofwat below.
Previous updates
In March 2024, our plan was updated in some areas. The key changes and their impact on expenditure and average bills are summarised below for reference. However, this information is superseded by the changes submitted in August 2024.