Capital investment in the period 2010-2015

Supplying water is a long-term business. We must plan well ahead to ensure the stability and sustainability of our services.

It is essential we invest sufficiently and in a properly targeted way to ensure all these assets continue to provide a reliable service for the water supply. In addition, we have certain targets agreed with our regulator, Ofwat, to make some further improvements to the service and to manage the availability of sufficient water resources through continuing to meter existing households.

In the five-year period from 2010 to 2015 we will need to invest a total of £42 million to achieve these targets.

The outputs and activities needed to deliver our commitments on drinking water quality and environmental improvements are:

• Install an ultra-violet treatment process at our Woodgreen treatment works to further reduce the already small risk from an organism named cryptosporidium, which can in some circumstances be present in the untreated raw water
• Further improve physical security at some sites in line with new guidance issued by the Government and strengthen our ability to deal with water supply emergencies

The activities needed to deliver our commitments on service to customers are:

• Reinforce the supply to Verwood to reduce the risk of service outage due to failure of key water mains in the area
• The outputs and activities needed to achieve a balance between supply and demand are:
• To provide a meter to 11,250 existing household customers it is assumed will request the option
• To meter 7,400 existing household properties on change of occupier
• Complete the construction of additional filtration capacity at our Knapp Mill treatment works

A summary of our commitments to maintain serviceability are:

• Renew 60km of mains during the 2010-2015 period to maintain the overall serviceability of the distribution network and prevent increasing mains failures.  
• Continue to replace the ageing galvanised iron communication pipes.  We intend to replace 9,000 such communication pipes in the five-year period.
• Install 690 flushing points through out the network to help prevent build up of iron particles in the system.
• Replace 23,800 customer meters.
• Increase the storage of potable water in the Beaulieu area to reduce the risk of customers being without water and refurbish the water towers in our network.
• Replace our data acquisition and monitoring system and improve the reliability of our plant and equipment.