Where your money goes
From providing high-quality drinking water, to treating wastewater, and investing in improvements in your community, here’s 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 we spend every £1 at Southern Water
The simplest way we can explain how we spend money is to take £1 and break it down into the different areas of work.
18p
Finding leaks, maintaining and improving 54,000km pipe network
7p
Reducing the use of storm overflows
7p
Removing wastewater nutrients and improving water quality
21p
Keeping toilets flushing and taking the wastewater away
6p
Securing new sustainable water sources for the future
14p
Supplying high quality water to taps and reducing supply interruptions
23p
Funding long-term investment to maintain and improve water and wastewater services
4p
Costs to service your account
How we spend every £1 at Southern Water
The simplest way we can explain how we spend money is to take £1 and break it down into the different areas of work.
18p
Finding leaks, maintaining and improving 54,000km pipe network
7p
Reducing the use of storm overflows
7p
Removing wastewater nutrients and improving water quality
21p
Keeping toilets flushing and taking the wastewater away
6p
Securing new sustainable water sources for the future
14p
Supplying high quality water to taps and reducing supply interruptions
23p
Funding long-term investment to maintain and improve water and wastewater services
4p
Costs to service your account
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.
