Water & Wastewater Treatment

www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | JANUARY 2016 | 17 He rejects the idea that regulation is holding back innovation - on the contrary, he says that developments linked to customer need will always be supported from a regulatory perspective – and is also confident that the industry's workforce has the right skills. "For the young people who are coming into the industry now, it's second nature to be holding a tablet or a smart phone in your hand and getting the best out of technology," says Taylor. "Those skills are developing in any case from the way society is changing." Times are also changing at Bournemouth Water, where the water company's acquisition by Pennon Group earlier this year will see it merged with South West Water. With the Competition and Markets Authority giving its final clearance to the merger in November, detailed planning of how the two companies will integrate is now fully underway. While stressing the potential benefits of the merger, Taylor adds that Bournemouth Water will retain its individual identity. "The Bournemouth brand and the Bournemouth local position in the community will continue for the foreseeable future," he says. "Working with South West Water, which is a bigger company and is also provides wastewater services, obviously does create opportunities to share experience and to collaborate on all sorts of projects, not least the smart networking area. "South West Water emerged from the last periodic review process as the most efficient water and sewerage business in England and Wales, and a lot of that is because of their use of technology to enable centralisation of resources. On the other hand, we in Bournemouth have been doing a lot of work with pressure management and network calming which I'm sure will be very interesting to South West Water, so there will be benefits in both directions." While Taylor is proud of Bournemouth Water's recent operational performance on key metrics – for example, its leakage rate of 14% is the second best in the country - he says that this should be perceived as doing well only "under the current rules of the game". He wants the company and the wider industry to strive for the next level of performance, which is why experimenting with, and investing in smart technology is so important. With a career that has seen him work extensively in Asia, and with Bournemouth having until recently been owned by a Singaporean company (Sembcorp) Taylor has seen at first hand how the heavy investment of Singapore's Public Utilities Board has seen the city state grow in little over 10 years to become a recognised hub for water technology research and development in Asia. He would like to see a similar atmosphere of innovation here in the UK, but feels it will some time before the sector will be able to declare itself 'smart' in a true sense. "There will be significant progress during this AMP cycle, but I very much doubt that at the end of this five year period you are going to be able to see smart networks all over the country, if that is defined as networks that have planned to or have moved down the smart route," says Taylor. "Some companies invest more than others in this area, and everybody has gone down this road to some extent; but to move to the point where water is what external commentators would consider to be a 'smart network', I think that will take much longer than this five-year period," he concluded. Hear more from Bob Taylor when he appears at WWT's Smart Networks conference in Birmingham, 17th March 2016. For more information visit: wwt-smartnetworks.net • CV: Bob Taylor ● Bob Taylor has over 30 years' experience of the water sector in both the UK and overseas. He spent much of his early career at Veolia group (now Affinity Water), where his roles included Area Manager and Head of Network Asset Management. ● In the 2000s he gained international experience as Managing Director of Vivendi Water (now Veolia Water) in Kazakhstan and Deputy Managing Director of ADWEA in the United Arab Emirates ● In 2007 he joined the Cascal Group as MD of The China Water Company, based in Hong Kong, where he was responsible for a group of six Chinese municipal water companies. He stayed in China during the Sembcorp acquisition of Cascal in 2010, before returning to the UK as Global Business Development Director in 2011 ● He became Director of Operations at (then Sembcorp-owned) Bournemouth Water in 2013, and MD in 2015. The company is now owned by Pennon Group. "It's all about trying to align the developments and the capability of smart networks technology with what customers are looking for in terms of their water service," Bob Taylor

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