Profits grow for Severn Trent
Water company Severn Trent , which serves 4.3 million customers across the Midlands and Mid Wales, saw growth in both turnover and profits for its last financial year.
It said there had been strong operational improvements in the 12 months to the end of March.
Group turnover was ahead by 3.7 per cent at £1.81 billion with pre-tax profit up 7.8 per cent to £544 million.
Severn Trent, which has the lowest combined average bills in Britain of £341 a year in 2017-2018, invested around £680 in 2016-2017 in its network.
Chief executive Liv Garfield said: "Customers are at the centre of everything we do and I am delighted that we have been able to deliver significant improvements in the things they care most about. Sewer floodings are down 21 per cent and we have further reduced both supply interruptions and leakages. We have done this while maintaining the lowest bills in Britain. These results are testament to the hard work of my colleagues over the past year."
Mrs Garfield added; "We know there is a lot of hard work needed to further improve our customers' experience when things go wrong and we are confident in our plans to deliver these improvements."
As part of its business plan it set an ambitious target to help 50,000 vulnerable customers per year and exceeded the target in 2016-2017 through schemes such as WaterSure and its range of social tariffs.
The number of customers impacted by sewer flooding incidents reduced by 40 per cent.
One of the biggest projects for the company is the Birmingham Resilience Project which will see around £300m being spent to make water supplies for the city more resilient.
During the year Severn Trent started work on the construction of the pipe from Lickhill, near Stourport, on the River Severn, to its treatment works at Frankley, which will ensure a second source of supply for residents in the Birmingham area.
On the Elan Valley Aqueduct scheme to reinforce water supplies to Birmingham it completed the first of three new tunnels at Bleddfa in Wales, successfully diverting the flow and allowing decommissioning of the old tunnel, ahead of target date.
It will shortly start generating gas at its second food waste plant at Roundhill, near Stourbridge.
The company has pledged to invest £6.2bn between 2015 and 2020, which is around £1,400 for every home and business property in the Severn Trent region, to further improve services.
It delivers almost two billion litres of water every day through 46,000km of pipes. A further 91,000km of sewer pipes take waste water away to more than 1,000 sewage treatment works.
