Water is vital for life – not just for people but for the environment and ecosystem on which we depend. Ofwat, the regulator for water companies, believes that companies should provide the very best service for customers by improving life through water. Customers expect great service that is both reliable and affordable.

The way Ofwat regulates incentivises and encourages water companies to find new and better ways of delivering services so that customers will get more of what really matters to them.

Each year Ofwat assesses the overall performance of water companies, ranking them in areas including leakage, customer satisfaction and pollution. The information in our service delivery report provides transparency for customers, and wider stakeholders, to see exactly how water companies are performing on the issues that matter to them.

The performance of four companies across a range of measures is encouraging, with Wessex Water appearing in the top category for the second year running.

It’s disappointing news for the customers of the poorer performers though. We expect Thames Water, Southern Water, Affinity Water and Hafren Dyfrdwy to deliver a real change in performance.

We know that leakage is an important issue for customers - lower leakage means less water is taken from the environment and fewer resources are required to process it. Leakage can also have a significant disruptive impact in the community. Ofwat has set companies a tough challenge to reduce leakage by 15%  - saving enough water to meet the needs of everyone in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield by 2024-25.

We’re pleased to see that most companies achieved their targets and reported leakage is 7% lower this year – this is a significant achievement but more work is to be done.

Customer satisfaction is another important way to measure performance. Ofwat has introduced a new way to measure customer experience and, from next year, new incentives will also be introduced. This is new measure us intended to drive further improvements, particularly among the best performing companies in this area. Those companies going above and beyond for customers could receive outperformance payments. But the poorer performers could face underperformance penalties of up to £20 million.

Water consumption also remains an important issue. If we all use less, then we do not need to take as much from the environment in the first instance. However, performance has been poor, as only three companies met their commitments to reduce water consumption. Since 2012-13 the sector’s performance has fallen by 2%.

Rapid progress is needed and all companies are required to use a range of measures to support customers to reduce water use for the 2020-25 period. We will be pushing companies hard on this in the coming months.

Interruptions to your water supply can be hugely frustrating and cause real difficulties for customers and businesses in everyday life. We are pleased that the number of people experiencing interruptions to their water supply or contacting their company about the quality of their water has reduced. In fact, in comparison to 2012-13, companies have reduced the total amount of supply interruption minutes experienced by customers by 36%, which is 145 million minutes or the equivalent of 2.4 million episodes of the Great British Bake Off!

Five companies outperform their 2020-21 targets with SES Water top of the table and even outperforming their 2024-25 performance commitment levels.

There is a growing need for companies to ensure they are looking after our natural environment. Water company performance regarding pollution has not been good enough and so a real step-change will be needed.

Performance on internal sewer flooding and pollution incidents has deteriorated this year, with fewer companies meeting their targets.

South West Water has missed most of its pollution targets in the past five years and Southern Water demonstrates extremely poor performance – it became the first company to be rated as 1 star by the Environment Agency since 2015.

New targets for the coming year will begin to bite if faster progress is not made.

Companies in England and Wales have generally improved performance in water but, in contrast to English companies, those in Wales improved wastewater performance.