Chief Executive's overview
Chris Loughlin
Chief Executive
South West Water Limited
Through the Company's 'Pure Water, Pure Service and Pure Environment' vision, South West Water is focused on achieving increased levels of customer service and operational performance whilst at the same time delivering greater efficiency and adhering to high standards of corporate responsibility. We see innovation and continuous improvement as being essential ingredients in achieving our vision.
The nature of our business means we have a significant role to play in ensuring the environmental, social and economic wellbeing of the communities in our region. In our 25-year Strategic Direction Statement, which sets out our long-term goals and strategies, economic, environmental and social sustainability are integrated into how we conduct our business today and are integral components of business plans going forward, to deliver these goals and strategies.
Since privatisation in 1989, we have transformed the quality of the region's drinking water, sewerage systems and bathing waters so that they meet stringent UK and European Union standards, whilst delivering improved operating efficiencies and higher levels of customer service. Whilst these developments have clearly met favour with our customer, environmental and regulatory stakeholders, it has also been important to attract finance stakeholders to the water sector: the level of investment required by South West Water over this period to allow the necessary quality improvements to be carried out has been over £3 billion.
There are significant new challenges ahead which include:
- responding to climate change impacts
- managing water resources to provide a reliable public service at an acceptable price
- rising customer expectations with reduced tolerance of failure and lower service levels
- diminishing customer ability and willingness to pay for future improvements
- refinement of the system of economic regulation to encourage innovative and sustainable solutions such as strategic catchment management.
This report analyses our corporate responsibility performance and aspirations under the sections of Economic, Environmental and Social Sustainability.
Our objectives are driven by the need to deliver optimum environmental performance to benefit society, whilst being mindful of price. Consequently our sustainability objectives align to those of Pennon Group which are:
- Manage Pennon Group as a sustainable and successful business for the benefit of shareholders and other stakeholders.
- Aim to ensure that all our business activities have a positive economic, social and environmental impact on the communities in which we operate.
- Engage with all our stakeholders and to foster good relationships with them.
- Strive for the highest standards of health and safety in the workplace so as to minimise accidents, incidents and lost time.
- Develop and motivate our employees, treat them fairly and ensure that they are fully engaged in all aspects of Pennon Group's objectives.
- Aspire to leadership in minimising emissions which contribute to climate change, and develop climate change adaptation strategies.
- Aspire to leadership in all aspects of waste prevention and resource efficiency.
We have developed with Pennon Group six key Corporate Responsibility KPIs which we believe to be key to meeting the interests of our customers, stakeholders, investors and the environment and this report sets out our performance against these KPIs:
- renewable energy generation
- greenhouse gas emissions
- recycling volumes
- community support sponsorship and donations
- RIDDOR accident statistics
- capital investment.
In this report we also describe the corporate responsibility targets we have set ourselves for 2011/12 and explain how we have performed against the targets we set for 2010/11.
