Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 22ND - 28TH MARCH 2019 | 7 Interview T ransparency, fairness, social contract. These words are appearing increasingly in the lexicon of utility firms, as anyone following Utility Week's New Deal for Utilities campaign and Ofwat's pronouncements, will be fully aware. But one person who can claim to have been embracing such sentiment longer than most is our latest Utility Week Live "change maker", Liz Barber director of finance, regulation and markets at Yorkshire Water. Barber was ahead of the pack in announcing the closure of Yorkshire Water's Cayman Islands banking arrangements in October 2017. And in December 2018 she pledged to release most of the business's operational and service data by 2020, starting with leakage and pol- lution. She has drawn up a decision-making framework that values the company's social impact, and has been instrumental in overlaying these new business processes with an ambitious manifesto – what the company is call- ing its five big goals. That's on top of the day-to-day running of the finan- cial side of the business. Currently she is divesting non- core subsidiaries. Non-domestic water retailers Yorkshire Water Business Services and Three Sixty were sold to Business Stream at the start of this year. Not surprisingly, catching up with her proves a logis- tical challenge and we agree to speak over the phone. Yes, she's busy, but there's good busy and bad busy, she explains. "Bad busy is busy solving problems; I'm not bad busy at the moment. Good busy is lying awake at night thinking about how we're going to make the best of this opportunity. And at the moment, thinking about our Fit for Future transformation programme." Fit for Future is the next big challenge in her in-tray, a devolution of decision-making to more frontline teams, which she and chief executive Richard Flint are driving. "The idea is that our people will feel engaged, respected, listened to, and have more control over how they deliver our services to customers," she explains. "It's an attitude really, that head office doesn't have all the answers." The programme is a big strand of work to help deliver Yorkshire Water's newly cast business plan, which centres on its role as a leading player in local communities – a self-styled anchor institution. Barber set out the five big service goals in October 2018: to offer a personal service to customers; keep bills down; increase transparency; reduce leaks by 40 per cent and boost conservation to ensure supply to an estimated one million more people in the region by 2045; and tackle key environment challenges, including avoiding pollution and sewer flooding. Even more ambitiously it wants to capture all sewage and convert it to energy. Yorkshire Water is investing nearly £1 billion in tackling long-term sustainability issues and reducing its impact on the environment to allow current infrastructure to cope with the forecast rise in population. "For water, that would mean reducing leakage, reducing our own water use, encouraging industrial users to use less than potable-grade water – we've got pilots looking at that at the moment," she explains. "That equates to the same costs, more people, reduced bills in the long term, while maintaining resilience." The five goals were framed aŸer a huge public consultation exercise of 26,000 people, with each goal getting over 90 per cent approval, says Barber. The strategy has been underpinned by the new social value committee, which, says Barber, "is making sure that we're forever developing and delivering to our social contract, and holding us accountable". It's headed up by

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