News
England & Wales’ Water Sector Outperforming European Counterparts
A new report examining the quality of water and wastewater utilities in Europe over the past 28 years has found that the sector in England and Wales has outperformed its counterparts in France, Ireland, Italy and Spain since 1990.
The Global Water Intelligence study found that our water sector is either the top performer or the most improved in five of the six key performance measures, including costs, customer service and water quality, WWT Online reports.
The conclusion was drawn that the water system throughout England and Wales provides the best value for money of all utility sectors covered in the study, and that its model has improved standards and reduced overall costs.
Germany does have a broadly similar quality service to the one we have here, it was found, but at greater expense, with prices around 12 per cent higher.
Commenting on the results, chief executive of Water UK Michael Roberts was quoted by the news source as saying: “The water industry has come a long way since privatisation in 1989, and customers are now five times less likely to have interrupted water supplies, eight times less likely to suffer sewer flooding, and 100 times less likely to have low water pressure.
“The business plans that companies have put forward for 2020 to 2025 propose an extra £50 billion of investment, which would see the service improved even further.”
Just this month (December), environment secretary Michael Gove issued a challenge to England’s water suppliers, urging them to slash water leakage in the country in half come the year 2050.
He explained that in order to maintain sufficient supplies of water in the future (which could see hotter summers by the year 2070 and a drop of up to 47 per cent in average summer rainfall), leakage would need to be addressed more aggressively as time goes on.
Mr Gove went on to note that more rainwater needs to be captured and stored, and this must be used and conserved more efficiently once it has been caught.
With a new year just around the corner, now’s the perfect time for businesses across England and Wales to see how they can protect our water resources – and making use of water leak detection services could be the perfect way to go about this.
Your business could be wasting a huge amount of water through leaks right now without you even knowing about it, because the vast majority of these take place tucked away below ground. You could already have sustained serious water damage as a result of leaks you’re unaware of and you might not notice you have a problem until you see a big spike in your water bills.
If you’d like an audit carried out so you can keep on top of issues like this, get in touch with us here at H2O Building Services today.
