Coventry Councillor Roadshow | Part 1 | Intro - Transcript

So this is Severn Trent. And as you might know, we pride ourselves on doing is taking care of one of life's essentials. Now, it's not the only life essential. There are other things that people desperately need. But you can't live without water. And on that basis, we do take it very seriously. We've got 8 million people every day that can’t have a shower, they can’t have a cup of tea, they can't go to the loo, they can’t do anything without us and we do desperately try to get it right every day. We don’t always get it right every day. We're all clear on that but we do desperately try. We do get it right more than anybody else in the sector. Doesn't mean that we haven't got really bold ambitions to get it even better for the future. But we are considered by all the regulators to be the best company in the sector.

Now we live in challenging times. And what I'm not going to do now is run you through a sales pitch of all the things Severn Trent does brilliantly. Instead, I want to talk about the things where I think we can do some more partnership work. Areas that you might not think of as our day job, but actually they’re things that people expect more and more of corporates. And I think COVID changed the whole relationship between companies and customers. People don't expect you to do a job now. They expect you to do that as the basic. But then they want more from you. Do it to reach out to your community and add more value. And if we look here, these are things that are actually the real challenges of our region right now. Whether it’s the cost of living crisis, whether it's youth unemployment, the belief in terms of what we can do on rivers, or Green Recovery, which covers a few different areas in terms of heading to net zero and some other things. These are the topics that I actually think people will judge us on. They want more from us and we want to do more in the space. So most critically, there are also areas that all of you are experts on. So wanted to share with you a plan so far get you bought into them, but also get feedback and ideas for future.

Now we start off actually with cost of living. Here's some key stats. So we serve 8 million customers. Of those who've got 400,000 customers in Coventry. Just to give you a sense of it, we know that about 50,000 of them right now today could be living with poverty. And whilst the things we do already and we're proud of those things, we already do all of these things. Our customers actually already have the second lowest bill in the land, and we're proud of that. We work really hard to make cost efficiencies internally to not put extra costs onto the bill. So this year, for example, we're facing an extra £100 million cost from energy and also from chemicals, but we'll be really careful. That's for us to manage. That's not something our customers have to worry about. We need to manage that situation. Now we know, though, that even though we help our customers lots and even though we know that the average bill is about a pound a day, there will still be people who are a pound a day is just an infeasible amount of money for them to be able to spend.

And what we announced a couple months ago, but maybe not everyone knows, is that we worked with the Consumer Council for Water. We identified with them: what would you need to do so that no customer in our region was nervous about the letter arriving for Severn Trent? So no customers unable to pay the bill and they identified that in our region, probably around 5% or 6% of people out of our base might at the top end struggling to pay the bill.

And what we announced back in May is that we would put an extra £30 million into a fund to help the couple hundred thousand customers who already helped to raise that to 315,000 customers that we financially support, I want to say, financial support. We don't give them like 5% off the bill. We give them up to 90% off the bill.

So for any customer that is truly, truly struggling, we would give them a 90% discount on what is already a pretty good value bill at about £370. And we do that each and every year and we work with customers to identify them. One of the opportunities is right now we haven't identified all of those customers, so we still have some spare capacity on the money that we've budgeted, put aside which one of the reasons we’re still out there kind of desperate to try to educate you to try find any last customer that can't afford the bill, we’ll assess them, check it and then look to help them.

We also have other financial support schemes, the Severn Trent Trust Fund Scheme, which actually has helped over 625,000 people. We've got a big difference scheme, we've got WaterSure, we've got payment matching. Sometimes somebody earns enough to be able to pay their bill net net. But they might be self-employed. They might have injured themselves, broken a leg for a couple of months and they just have a cash flow issue. We can then help them during that period of time, put a pause on it, get back into it. They might get themselves into debt for something totally different. We can help them recover that and payment match to get them back in off the debt. We've got a whole range of things that we do to really help people in this area.

And of course, if anyone's got a medical issue or disability of any type, we'd love to know that. If we know it, if there ever is a burst pipe and we can't supply water to that customer that day, we will do something extra. We'll get bottled water out to them, will manage their needs specifically, much before we would do for the rest of community. So knowing the somebodies, it might just be age, you know, my parents are going to age now 72, 76. They should definitely be on the list. It's just identifying people that need the help. We just want anybody who needs any extra support to be named with us.