Investing in every drop

Worcestershire

Your Severn Trent newsletter – February 2025

Hello, I'm Jude Burditt

Director of Customer Solutions, and a proud Severn Trenter – one of almost 10,000!

It’s a massive responsibility to keep drinking water flowing for over 8.5 million people across the whole region and take away your waste, and we’re proud to do what we do. It’s a 24/7 job, 365 days a year – here’s just a snapshot of what we cover:

I wanted to share with you what Severn Trent is working on, for you and your community. After, all, you need to know that you can trust us to look after our water, our customers, our community and the environment we all live in.

These are our promises to you:

There are loads of great things going on here and some of them might surprise you. And what we’ve been doing goes far beyond what happens before you turn on the tap, or after you flush the loo!

Whether you want to know about improvements Severn Trent has been making in your area, our plans for the future, or some of the secrets behind supplying two million tonnes of fresh water every single day, hopefully there’s something here for you.

So why not make yourself a cuppa – using only the best Severn Trent water, of course - sit down, and read on?

In this issue

Topics you can read

The future of water for you

in Worcestershire

Let’s talk about what’s in the pipeline for your area between now and 2030. It’s an exciting time and you can expect to see positive changes in how we serve you and your community. And we’ll be playing our part to protect the places you love, too.

Headlines

What you’ll see in Worcestershire

Naturally you’ll want to know what this means locally. Here are just some highlights:

Across our region

What we’ve been doing for you and your water

Water companies work in five-year cycles, and at the start of each one we set out all the things we’re going to do for our customers, the places where they live, and the networks we use to serve them.

We’re just coming to the end of our current cycle (2020-25), so let’s look at some of the things you might have seen Severn Trent doing in your area, and across our patch, since 2020.

Across our region

In your community

How we’ve been supporting the places where our customers live

There’s more to Severn Trent than supplying water and taking away waste (although clearly we think they’re pretty important).

We’re proud to be a part of this region, and many of us live here too. Making a positive difference to the communities that make up the Severn Trent region is something we really care about. So in 2020, we committed to donating £2million a year out of profits to charities and community organisations in the Midlands.

By March 2025, we will have donated over £11.5million to 879 organisations. £8million of this has gone towards new projects with £3.5million donated to help local charities and community groups with their core costs, so they can continue to offer the vital services they provide. Our donations have helped support over 6.5 million people in the last five years.

Rivers – what we’re going to do

Rivers and streams matter to many of us. They’re habitats for nature, great spots to spend time, and for many of us, places that are almost literally on our doorsteps.

We’ve been listening to what you want. We want the same things; rivers that are better, for people and for nature. So we’ve been working, looking at our sewage system, overflows into waterways and treatment works.

This is a long-term job, but already we’re seeing some big changes for the better:

Our ambition is for the amount of spills from each storm overflow to fall to reach an average of 14 per year by 2030. 

Want to see some real-life examples of what we’ve been doing? 

 

We’re not stopping

You’ve told us how you feel about rivers and streams, and we’ve listened. We’re putting in the investment, the effort, and the knowledge, to make the regions waterways better for everyone. And we’re going to keep going and play our part. 

Based on what local customers told us, we’ve been able to direct investment to the right places early on, so we’re making the biggest difference. And our River Rangers – a team of dedicated specialists working every day on the riverbanks – came about because you wanted to have eyes and ears out and about in the places that matter most to you.

Working with local people, community groups, farmers and landowners, wildlife trusts, you’re going to see Severn Trent leading the way for water companies in the UK and beyond.

We’re plumbed into nature. And it matters to us too.

A changing climate

We live on a rainy island with moderate weather. Rarely too hot or too cold. A pretty good state of affairs for a water company, you might think. However, it might not always be the case.

Nobody knows exactly what will happen in the future when it comes to climate change. So we’ve been planning the potential impacts to make sure you and your families can rely on us, whatever the weather.

Most predictions for the climate over the next few decades give us hotter, drier summer periods. Winters are likely to be wetter, with more extreme heavy rainfalls.

In other words, water might be harder to come by when we need it, and the risk of flooding could be higher as drains fill and the excess water has nowhere to go.

Our plans

The good news is that we’re ahead of the game and have already been planning for the impact of a changeable climate. And the plans we’ve set out mean we’re already making improvements.

The work we’re doing to increase your water supply, such as reducing leaks, replacing mains pipes and investing in increasing production, will give us hundreds of millions of litres of more water per day.

But with a growing population, we can’t just rely on pumping more through the system. Helping people be more water efficient – with smart meters, special tariffs and water-saving devices - will help make sure there’s enough to go around for everyone.

But what about drainage? Will flash floods be a regular part of our future?

This is where our programme to protect river health gives everyone long term benefits. Increasing the capacity of the sewer system not only helps to cut down on spills into rivers, but it also gives us more space to store stormwater.

So while the future of our climate remains unpredictable, we’re investing to make sure you and your family get a secure and reliable service for generations – whatever the weather.  

Did you know?

We think it’s only right that we listen to what you say and act on it. Here are some of the regular questions you’ve been asking about Severn Trent recently.

Running one of the UK’s biggest water companies - and making sure it’s fit for the future – is a big job, and one that you’d expect us to invest in properly. So in recent years the amount of money we’ve invested in the networks that serve you has been around four times more than our dividend payments, showing we don’t spend more on dividends to shareholders. In fact, the opposite is true.

Our shareholders range from individual savers and charities all the way to big companies and pension funds. Alongside the money we get from customers, shareholders help us pay for the big things we want to do, like improving our infrastructure and helping to protect the environment. Shareholders recently gave us an extra £1 billion so we could improve storm overflows more quickly than any other water company.

Customers and communities will benefit from this with better service and a better environment. For shareholders, the return they get is their dividend. And with our plans for the next five years agreed and going ahead, you’ll see us investing even more.

Most of us live here too, and we want the same things as you do when it comes to rivers and streams.

We’re not going to pretend we have had no impact on rivers, but we’ve have made massive changes already. The work we did just last year – improving around 1,500 of our overflows – is already having an impact.

Just one example is the River Chelt in Gloucestershire. Our Charlton Kings overflow had spilled 25 times in 2023. But after a series of investments into monitors, a large new storm tank and improvements to the surrounding pipe network, the spills plummeted to just one in 2024, a fall of 96% on the previous year.

We know what needs to happen, and we’re doing it. We have big plans and you’ll see us working on them across your region over the next five years, but we’re already seeing an effect. And we won’t rest until we’ve cut our impact to as close to zero as we can.

This matters to us, as we want you and everyone else to be happy with what comes out of your tap.

Every drop that we supply, whether it comes from our reservoirs or boreholes, goes through a 12-hour process at one of our treatment plants to make it good to drink.

A lot of the time, short-term water problems like cloudiness or a funny taste can come about if we’re working on the pipes in your area, so we now tell local people if that’s the case.

To make your supply even more reliable for the long-term, we’re going to be replacing more than 1,300 km of mains pipes in the next five years. That’s the single-biggest investment into your water supply in our history, and one of the largest in the country.

We think our water’s wonderful, and we want you to get it at its best.

In the pipeline

Thanks for reading, and I hope you learned something new about Severn Trent, our water, and what we’re doing in your area.

We want to keep you up to date with water, so this the first of our newsletters. Hope to see you again soon.

In the next edition: