Ian McAulay, CEO of Southern Water, has expressed the company’s disappointment with its fall in the ratings in the Environment Agency’s annual report on the environmental performance of the nine water and sewerage companies in England released this week.

The recent EA report shows four out of the nine companies are falling short of expected standards – Anglian, Northumbrian and South West Water and Southern Water. Southern Water is the first company to be rated as 1 star (poor) since 2015.

Commenting on the report’s findings, Ian McAulay said:

“As would rightly be expected we are extremely disappointed to have fallen in the ratings awarded in this year’s Environmental Performance Assessment. We are already taking bold steps to set our pollution record straight.

“We invested an additional £3.2 million during 2019–20 to improve our ability to find and fix leaks alongside an additional £54 million to improve pollution performance.

“Southern Water is a company in transformation and last month we announced our Pollution Incident Reduction Plan, which was shared with the Environment Agency following months of work. We are one of the first organisations in the sector to have analysed the challenge in detail and developed a plan around it. It sets out a plan to reduce pollution incidents to 80 per year by 2025, and zero pollution incidents by 2040.

“We are also fully confident this plan and future iterations will allow us to reduce the number of pollutions incidents in the imminent future.”

The detailed Pollution Reduction Plan has been shared with Defra and the Environment Agency.

Read this Pollution Reduction Plan here