Water & Wastewater Treatment

18 | XXXXX 20XX | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk In Focus T he first, massive, job was to move big numbers of office-based, primarily call centre staff, to home working, in observance of the government's social distancing guidelines. It's been an unprecedented shi•, exacerbated by sickness absence levels running at about five per cent across the industry. "Most of our back office people are now remote working, two-thirds of our contact centre, all our scheduling and deployment teams. The only functions now in our main offices are 24-hour alarm monitoring and duty management. Because those offices are now pretty sparse, we've been able to space out those guys and girls to maintain social distance," says Ian Rule, director of customer at Anglian. "It's fair to say there was a bit of blitz spirit in the past couple of weeks in terms of getting everyone moving and working from home," he says. The moves have tested water companies' adaptability: at Anglian, home working policies were quickly ad- justed, and at Yorkshire Water – where the call centre was strongly impacted by school closures owing to staff demo- graphics – operational calls were prioritised over billings for a time. "The call centre discussions with a couple of companies but it's a moving feast by the day." A coordinated response The Department for Envi- ronment, Food and Rural Affairs's (Defra) decision to grant critical worker status to water company operatives and nominated supply chain work- ers was a welcome turning point in the unfolding crisis. Spencer, who, with Welsh Water managing director Pete Perry, co-chairs the industry's Platinum Incident Manage- ment (PIM) team, explains how the system works: "We agreed with Defra that an ID badge should be sufficient to demon- strate that the person works for Thames Water, or another water company, and o•en they are also driving liveried vans. Some of our work such as network repairs are primarily outsourced and these suppli- Dealing with the coronavirus crisis The coronavirus crisis is stressing the water industry more severely than any event since the Second World War. Every ounce of resource, knowledge and wit is demanded to handle the unfolding crisis. Liz Bury reports on the sector's response so far. 18 | MAY 2020 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk had higher levels of sickness absence and precautionary self-isolation than the rest of the business, and it did that a bit earlier. It was a challenge moving that to home working, but we're through that now and the position is much more stable," says Richard Emmot, director of corporate affairs at Yorkshire Water. Water companies' other swi•, people-centred response has seen them identify key, high-skilled individuals and back-ups. "We have a number of large water production facilities supplying 90 per cent of the water into London," says Steve Spencer, operations director at Thames Water. "Each of those has its own 24-hour control room on site. Clearly they are critical workers. We have restricted access to those sites and control rooms particularly. We reduced the social interaction on sites. We identified people who used to fulfil those roles and have moved on elsewhere in the business and they are being retrained to provide back up," he says. Consultants with staff available are on standby potentially to supply people into roles vacated by staff switching around. Mark Fletcher, global water leader at Arup, says: "We have been approached about back-filling non-critical roles. We are in ers have a letter of authority signed by water company chief operating officers explaining why they are a key worker. When that status was granted it helped us enormously." The industry response has been coordinated through the PIM team, as well as other cross-industry working arrangements which were instigated last year as part of planning for a potential disor- derly Brexit. The PIM group, five work teams covering chemicals supply, non-chemicals supply, regulatory measures, vulnera- ble customers, and communica- tions, and the National Incident Management Group (NIM), an operational coordination team, were set up last year under trade body Water UK. They stood down when the spectre of no-deal Brexit receded, but immediately were revitalised again when Coronavirus hit. Critical incident planning remains a priority. 18 | XXXXX 20XX | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk

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