Working with customers to adapt to climate change

The East of England is on the front line of climate change, facing the dual challenges of drought and extreme flooding. We continue to work hard and are investing more than ever to ensure that we play our part to adapt to these increasing pressures. However, we can’t do it alone and are grateful that our customers have welcomed working with us to tackle the climate change challenges of our region together.

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‘Love Every Drop’

We are proud of our continued work with customers to help them reduce their water use which plays a pivotal role in our strategy to safeguard resilient water supplies. Our ‘Love Every Drop’ behavioural change campaign encourages people to use water wisely to reduce their carbon and water footprints, see savings on their bills and adapt to a drier future.

We tailor our communications; including through targeted local communications during times of drought and peak summer demand, making customers aware of water scarcity and their ability to make a difference during these periods, and through demographic specific communications, for example, providing baby dams to families to help them reduce the water needed for a baby's bath.

We have launched research-based challenges such as our ‘Shorter Shower Challenge’ to encourage customers to cut showers to just 5 minutes a day, helping to save each household approximately 28,000 litres of water and over £100 in energy and water annually.

However, we know that achieving behavioural change is challenging, so we’ve been collaborating with the University of East Anglia to develop a best practice behavioural change toolkit for us, and to share more widely to benefit others.

Our behavioural change work is complemented and informed by our smart metering programme where we plan to install 1.1 million smart water meters by the end of 2025, covering around 55% of our customer base. Our plan to roll-out smart water meters to all properties enables us to develop a near-real time understanding of customers' usage. Smart-metered customers can benefit from hourly usage updates through our MyAccount app, supporting them to understand and reduce their usage. In our Newmarket trials, we were able to reduce consumption by an average of 12% per property through finding and fixing leaks in customers properties, targeted awareness and behavioural change campaigns.

To inform future efforts, our ‘Enabling Water Smart Communities’ project is answering important questions about how we can encourage new developments to adopt an integrated water management approach and incorporate measures like localised water reuse.

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‘Keep it clear’

Our programme to clear blockages has been supported by our ‘Keep it Clear’ campaign, which educates the public on their role in keeping sewers clear. We clear over 40,000blockages every single year, caused by wrongly flushed items, as well as a build-up of fats, oils and greases. This equates to one blockage every five minutes – of which 80% are avoidable. 11 billion wet wipes are disposed of each year – and the number of skips we fill with rubbish like wipes would stack upas high as Mount Everest. We are revamping our ‘Keep it Clear’ messaging to be clearer and more action orientated, through our ‘Just Bin It’ campaign.

To prevent blockages at source, we have also been working with environmental compliance experts (ECAS) to identify Food Serving Establishments (FSEs) that can cause blockages by disposing of cooking fats down the drain and are engaging with business owners in hotspot areas to encourage positive behaviour change.