Response to Ofwat on Freeze/Thaw event
In late February to early March 2018, we experienced a Freeze/Thaw event.
This led to 7,700 (0.33%) of our customers being out of supply for up to four hours and 2,246 (0.1%) of our customers being out of supply for up to three days.
We recognise the issues raised in Ofwat’s report and also our lessons learnt from previous experiences and I’m pleased to report we are implementing key improvement programmes in the current AMP period to deliver step changes in our organisation and improve overall operational resilience.
Our response describes improvement actions completed since the event and those which are ongoing, many of our improvement initiatives were in flight before the Freeze/Thaw event and approximately 40% of our plan has been completed. Examples of completed activities include our new incident management framework and the increase in our contact centre capacity by 100%.
Resilience is at the heart of our recently submitted PR19 Business Plan and together we are transforming Southern Water, developing innovative approaches and best practices to improve our operational resilience. The improvement actions we have put in place are designed to cover both Freeze/Thaw and broader challenges, including other extreme weather events.