Where your money goes
From providing clean water to treating wastewater and investing in infrastructure improvements, we want you to know where your money goes.
What you pay
The money you pay us helps run the business, maintaining sites and the network of pipes that bring water to your taps and take your waste away to be treated. It also helps to manage the loans we take out to build new infrastructure – much like a mortgage payment.
How your bill is spent
The simplest way we can explain it is to take £1 and break it down into the different elements you pay for. Figures shown here are based on Ofwat's PR24 Final Determination for Southern Water (excluding delivery mechanism).
20p
Maintaining and growing our 54,000km network
6p
Reducing the use of storm overflows
4p
Removing wastewater nutrients, improving water quality
18p
Keeping toilets flushing and taking the wastewater away
2p
Finding and fixing more leaks with better technology
3p
New sustainable water sources for the future
20p
More high quality water to your taps and less outages
23p
Interest on loans to fund long-term investment
4p
Retail costs including a new billing system
How your bill is spent
The simplest way we can explain it is to take £1 and break it down into the different elements you pay for. Figures shown here are based on Ofwat's PR24 Final Determination for Southern Water (excluding delivery mechanism).
20p
Maintaining and growing our 54,000km network
6p
Reducing the use of storm overflows
4p
Removing wastewater nutrients, improving water quality
18p
Keeping toilets flushing and taking the wastewater away
2p
Finding and fixing more leaks with better technology
3p
New sustainable water sources for the future
20p
More high quality water to your taps and less outages
23p
Interest on loans to fund long-term investment
4p
Retail costs including a new billing system
Customers and stakeholders decide how this money is spent
Every five years we ask our customers and key stakeholders to help us develop a series of priorities, which we then use (alongside requirements from our regulator, Ofwat) to create a five-year ‘asset management plan’, or AMP.
Ofwat asks us for this, as part of what’s called a regulatory price review. It then looks at our plan and decides how much we can spend on certain activities.
Ofwat delivers this decision in a ‘Final Determination’ which we use to create a five-year delivery plan. Our shareholders will then see where they need to top up the spending allocated by Ofwat. We use the money our shareholders invest to fund capital investment schemes (large construction projects) as this means our customers are not paying directly for future improvements.
