South West Water must build reservoirs of trust 

The MP for the West Cornwall and Isles of Scilly constituency of St Ives, Andrew George, will urge new South West Water (SWW) CEO, Keith Haslett, to concentrate his company’s priority on “building reservoirs of trust” with the customers and communities it serves. While important investments in drainage infrastructure to avert sewage spills, or to address water outages and to better prepare for forecast drought conditions have been held back, top executives like the last SWW CEO, Susan Davy was paid an annual Salary of £803,000 and a controversial bonus of £270,000 in her last year (her 5-year cumulative total remuneration package as CEO amounted to nearly £6.8 million).  

Mr George is due to meet Mr Haslett later this month and will challenge him and his company to build trust and invest in core services, not rewarding the top executives. 

He put out this social media post this morning. The text: 

South West Water (SWW) seems only to have built a reservoir of doubt and scepticism. Confidence in the company has been seeping away.

The private monopoly, which has set up by the Conservatives with legal backing to levy the highest water bills in the country, has finally drained the well of excuses they can use for poor performance.

This week they presented MPs with a plausible-sounding set of justifications for introducing the hosepipe ban. After all, we know there’s been an unprecedented period of dry weather, even after Biblical rainfall earlier this year.

However, SWW has chosen to abuse its risk-free monopoly status to invest in eye-watering salaries and bonuses for the top brass and generous shareholder dividends rather than in improving their services, the basic infrastructure, halting the millions of gallons leaking from their systems and building resilience in response to clear predictions of increased likelihood of the kind of drought conditions currently experienced.
I’ll meet the new SWW CEO Keith Haslett later this month.

While our communities will no doubt soldier on, I’ll explain (as I did to his predecessor) scepticism and criticism of the company has grown. We need to see a BIG change if the company wants to improve its standing with customers.