Our Journey to Zero
At Welsh Water, our vision is simple. It’s to earn the trust of our customers every single day and we take seriously our duties as provider of essential public services to over 3 million people across most of Wales and adjoining parts of England.
This unique responsibility gives us a crucial role to play in helping to enhance not only the wellbeing of these customers and their communities but also the environment on which we all depend – both now and for generations to come. Protecting our environment is essential to helping protect our health, homes, water supplies and food production.
Our Commitment
This isn’t simply a target in relation to infrastructure or operational emissions as it’s about changing the way we think, plan and deliver. We’re a socially responsible company with a clear purpose and vision to earn the trust of our customers every day.
This is about taking responsibility for managing the biggest challenge of our time in terms of climate change, focusing on the long-term and ensuring we help protect our customers, communities and the wider environment while leaving a fairer future for generations to come."
Peter Perry
Chief Executive of Welsh Water
Our Manifesto For Rivers in Wales
Many different factors contribute to river water quality – of which wastewater is one element. We have a strong environmental record and have invested heavily to protect water quality in both our rivers and seas. This has delivered real improvements and helped ensure that Wales has over a third of the UKs Blue Flag beaches while only having 15% of the coastline and that 40% of our rivers and waterbodies meet good ecological status compared to 16% in England.
We recognise however that with environmental legislation tightening and customer expectations changing, more needs to be done. We plan to target our investment to those assets which have the biggest impact on the environment, whether that’s storm overflows operating more than we’d like or too much phosphorus leaving our treatment works. We understand we must improve their performance. That is why we have launched our Manifesto for Rivers in Wales which outlines our plans to help improve river quality. This includes:
- Investing £1.5 billion in the decade to 2025 on our wastewater system.
- Investing significantly to improve storm overflows with £25m being invested between 2020-2025 with a further £420m planned from 2025 to 2030.
- Investing an additional £60m specifically to reduce phosphorus in the five failing Special Area of Conservation (SAC) rivers in our operating area.
- Delivering a comprehensive programme of upgrades to our treatment works that will remove 90% of our phosphorus releases by 2030.
- How our business operating model has allowed us to bring forward over £100m additional investment in our wastewater infrastructure accelerating investment that will have a direct benefit in improving rivers in Wales by 2025.
Our Manifesto For Rivers in Wales
PDF, 1.3MB
We have launched our Manifesto for Rivers in Wales which outlines our plans to help improve river quality.