Water & Wastewater Treatment

14 | DECEMBER 2015 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Industry leader Steve Wilson, Director of Wastewater Services, Welsh Water "It's time to really look at our worst-served customers... to see which customers get a poor deal." Interview by James Brockett I mproving the wastewater services provided by water companies in the UK has typically involved playing the numbers game. Regulatory targets for the number of pollution incidents, complaints and incidents of sewer flooding are normally at the front of mind for executives and operational leaders alike. Dwr Cymru Welsh Water's numbers might have been going in the right direction for some time, but according to Steve Wilson, Director of Wastewater Services, these figures should no longer be the sole focus. The utility has set itself an ODI in this AMP period to improve its service to its worst-served customers - people who have made repeated complaints over the years. Since these customers' problems are o…en the most difficult or uneconomic to solve, this work is anything but a quick win, yet is the right thing to do, as Wilson explains. "We are at an interesting point on the journey of improving customer service," he says. "Over the past five AMP periods, we have been focused on reducing the number of customer complaints and improving treatment compliance, and those programmes have been driven by the numbers. Where we might have had several hundred customers a year suffering internal flooding, now we have less than a hundred. So we could pat ourselves on the back about that progress, but actually, now is the time to really look at the few customers who are at the bottom of that mix, and who have suffered repeatedly, but because of the economics of the job or the solution for their particular problem they are outside of that cost curve. "It might be something like the manhole at the bottom of a customer's garden that floods. From a regulatory point of view, that's classed as other flooding and it doesn't gain much strategic investment. But actually, the garden might be that customer's pride and joy, they spend a lot of time in it, which is why we end up with a complaint. Tackling that sort of problem can bring complaints down dramatically." The utility wants to achieve what Wilson calls "customer-led success", focusing on the problems that matter most to customers. One of the ways it has been seeking to tackle flooding and hydraulic overload in particular is through its SuDS schemes in urban areas. Its award- winning RainScape Llanelli programme in AMP5 demonstrated how a huge amount of surface water could be prevented from entering the sewer network in a densely-populated, concrete- heavy environment by introducing natural drainage features, and more such schemes are underway in AMP6. Wilson describes SuDS as "one of the tools in the toolbox" for overcoming sewer flooding challenges, although he stresses that they are not appropriate everywhere, and demand a large investment of time and resources. "What we have found with our RainScape schemes, as we call them, is that they take longer to put in the ground, they require a much

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