The recent PR19 comprehensive price review of the water industry by Ofwat, the economic regulator of the water sector in England and Wales has targeted an aggressive “reducing leakage by 15% within base costs” and provides financial motivation to water industry to improve the quality of its asset data.  This has been motivated by Ofwat’s observation that “over the past two decades, despite material technological progress, the sector has achieved little overall reduction in leakage” 

Currently water utilities suffer financial penalties for customer lost minutes from failure of the company’s assets or unplanned interruptions. PR19 extends financial penalties for water companies to cover failures caused by third parties.  This is a game changer  for how the water sector operates because it provides strong financial motivation to water utilities to reduce damage during 3rd party excavation.  As Richard Broome of LinesearchBeforeUDig (LSBUD) put it in a recent article in WWT,  “One area of particular focus with PR19 is asset resilience … It now treats asset failures caused by third parties in the same way as any other failure of the company’s assets or unplanned interruptions, and the financial penalties that result from customer lost minutes can be considerable.”

The implications of this regulatory ruling is that water companies will be financially motivated to increase investment in improving the quality of their location and other data for their underground network assets.  They will also be motivated to find ways to make this data accessible to excavators, possibly through Digdat (Anglian Water Services) , LSBUD, or another sharing service.  Water utilities will need to address the issue of ensuring reliable as-builts are captured for newly installed water assets.  They will also need to find ways to improve the quality of their location data for existing assets, which is a major challenge because some water assets were put in the ground in the 17th Century.