Our Purpose is to bring environmental and social prosperity to the region we serve through our commitment to Love Every Drop.

 

Our public interest journey

Our public interest journey
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Water is vital to health and wellbeing, to the economic prosperity of the East of England, and to maintaining a thriving natural environment that we can all enjoy. Yet we face growing challenges to supply from population growth in our region and the escalating climate emergency. To meet these challenges, we all have to play our part in balancing the needs of society, business and the environment to enable a sustainable future.

 

At Anglian Water we have always recognised the special responsibility we hold as a monopoly provider of an essential public service. We have a duty to deliver wider benefits to society, above and beyond the provision of fresh, clean water.

 

That responsibility is woven throughout our long-term Strategic Direction Statement and our five-year business plan, which are shaped around the need to facilitate growth in our region, unlock opportunities for our customers and stakeholders, safeguard our environment and provide a resilient supply for generations to come.

 

Enshrining our Purpose

 

Our commitment to the environmental and social prosperity of our region goes back many years. We first considered climate change in our assessment of water resources back in 1993 and our education programme has reached nearly half a million people since its launch in 2006. In 2015 we were awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Sustainable Development in recognition of our work, while in 2017 we were named Responsible Business of the Year, in large part due to our community regeneration work in Wisbech.

 

In recent years, with the climate emergency accelerating and the challenges of providing resilient supplies to our growing population becoming ever more acute, we have played a leading role in driving industry-wide discussions around the social and environmental purpose of a water company (highlighted by the British Academy in its influential report Principles for Purposeful Business, published in November 2019).

 

We were instrumental in the development of the water industry’s shared Public Interest Commitment, published in April 2019, in which we each committed to enshrining public interest in our company’s purpose and signed up to five ambitious goals to tackle leakage, carbon emissions, plastics, affordability and social mobility.

 

With our shareholders’ support, in July 2019 Anglian Water became the first water company to change our company constitution – the Articles of Association – to lock public interest into the way we run our business, both now and for future generations.

 

By doing so we have ensured that environmental and social priorities will always sit alongside the need to deliver fair returns for our shareholders.

 

This change underlines our commitment to deliver a sustainable future for the East of England.

 

Our Articles of Association

 

Our enhanced Articles of Association require Anglian Water to conduct its business and operations for the benefit of shareholders while delivering long-term value for the company’s customers, the region and the communities it serves, and seeking positive outcomes for the environment and society. Put simply, this means that our Board must take account of the wider impact Anglian Water has on our customers, communities and the environment, as well as delivering a fair return for our shareholders. We’ve summed this up in a simple statement of our Purpose:

 

“Our Purpose is to bring environmental and social prosperity to the region we serve through our commitment to Love Every Drop.”

 

As part of the change, our directors made an explicit commitment to consider:

 

  • the impact of our operations on communities and the environment;
  • the interests of the company’s employees;
  • the need to foster good relationships with customers and suppliers;
  • the need to maintain our reputation for high standards of business conduct; and
  • the consequences of decisions in the long term.

 

We are already backed by pension funds representing local authorities and other public-sector workers in the UK and overseas. We believe our Articles will continue to attract responsible long-term investors who share our values.

 

Our Articles of Association means our Board will:

 

  • Adopt a statement of responsible business principles.
  • Invite a reputable independent body to scrutinise our policies and performance against these principles.
  • Demonstrate in our Annual Integrated Report how we have run the company in accordance with our purpose and the responsible business principles.

 

We will also account for our performance and invite challenge from others:

 

  • We will strengthen our Customer Board which talks directly to our Management Board.
  • We will enhance our relationships with regional and national stakeholders, giving them the opportunity to influence our business decisions.
  • We will continue to engage our employees through formal and informal channels to help shape our organisation.

 

By changing our Articles we have locked environmental and social interest into our core purpose for the long term.

 

Peter Simpson, CEO, Anglian Water

This change to our Articles of Association crystallises a journey we’ve been on for many years and will ensure that public interest remains at the heart of Anglian Water for generations to come.

Read more from Peter on our Articles of Association change.

 

Creating a sustainable future for us all

A Social Contract with our customers, their communities and our environment

 

We have an unrivalled opportunity to have a positive impact on the environment and the communities we serve. And our millions of customers have a key role to play in achieving that positive outcome. That’s why we have worked with them to develop a two-way social contract, to set out how we can work together to protect and enhance our environment and deliver social prosperity to our region.

 

Our customers’ views play a huge part in shaping our thinking – our five-year plan for 2020-2025 has been informed by more than 500,000 customer engagements, and we consult regularly via our Online Customer Community, our Customer Engagement Forum, set up in 2011, and our Customer Advisory Board.

 

So, to develop our Social Contract, we worked in partnership with our customers to really understand and address their priorities. We held face-to-face workshops, consulted our Customer Engagement Forum and Online Customer Community and surveyed our employees. The results told us that words are good, but what matters is action.  Customers want to see progress in their local area, understand how we are making a difference to their community, and be equipped with the knowledge and tools to make positive changes themselves.

 

What they say…

 

  • Don’t just be responsible – be a “force for good” in the region.
  • Deliver the basics brilliantly – tackle leakage, prevent pollutions, deliver value for money.
  • Step up on the big issues – our customers trust us on issues such as climate change, single use plastics and vulnerability and want to see us champion their interests.

 

Our Social Contract is framed around the 10 customer outcomes we have set for our business. It defines what it means to us to act with purpose and to set out the positive impact we seek to bring to our communities and the environment in the region we serve. In exchange we invite you to hold us to account against these commitments, but also to play an active part in creating a sustainable future.

 

Outcomes wheel
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Together we can create a future for our region where people, communities and the environment thrive: building a sustainable future for us all in this rapidly changing world.

 

Anglian Water's five-point plan for community recovery

Our continued commitment to social prosperity

 

This plan summarises the continued support we are committed to giving to our communities across its region, our determination to work with partners and policymakers to realise a long term, sustainable social and economic recovery following the pandemic, and our belief in ‘building back better’. 

 

The five-point plan for community recovery focuses on health and wellbeing, supporting vulnerable customers, increasing social mobility and being an inclusive business. It also outlines our commitment to provide financial support to almost half a million customers each year. 

 

Our Community Recovery Plan complements the five-point Green Recovery Plan, published in September 2020, which outlined the journey for environmental recovery from the pandemic and set out plans to accelerate £300 million of environmental investment, which are now being implemented, with 1,184 schemes delivered since 2020. 

 

Both Plans support how we address the unique pressures we face, as the water company with the fastest growing population in the UK and one of the driest regions in the country, while fulfilling our commitment to bring wider environmental and community prosperity to the region we serve. 

 

Embedding six capitals into our decisions

 

Having enshrined public interest into the heart of our business, we are now working to embed it into decision making.

 

Our Board have committed to using the six capitals framework. This framework is not new to Anglian Water – this way of thinking was first introduced into our Annual Integrated Report in 2015 – but we will now formalise its use as we begin to deliver our new five-year business plan.

 

What are the six capitals?

 

Six capitals
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Natural

The health of the natural systems and resources that we rely on and impact in our region and beyond; the availability and quality of water in our rivers and aquifers, the protection of our soil and biodiversity and our impact on carbon emissions.

 

Social

The value of our relationships with stakeholders, including customers, communities and other organisations, the impacts we have on people and society (both positive and negative) and the trust they place in us as a result.

 

Financial

The financial health and resilience of the organisation and our access to and use of sustainable finance.

 

Manufactured

The ability of our infrastructure to provide resilient services to meet the current and future expectations of our customers.

 

People

The knowledge, skills and wellbeing of our people; and the health, happiness and safety of our working environment; our organisational culture and our ways of working.

 

Intellectual

The knowledge, systems, processes, data and information we hold, create and share within our business and with our alliance partners.

 

Using a six capitals lens will help us keep our responsibility to customers, communities and the environment at the front of our minds when making business decisions.

 

We’ve developed a set of metrics for each of the capitals to help us understand, track and report on our impact on them.

 

We've also identified key metrics to embed in our decision making across the business for our investments, purchasing, strategic and operational decisions.

 

Developing a natural capital plan for the East of England

 

Working with Water Resources East, we’ve joined forces with Biodiversify, supported by WWF UK and the Coca Cola Foundation, to develop a stakeholder-led natural capital plan for Eastern England. The plan, now in its second iteration, seeks to identify where natural capital action should be prioritised across the landscape in order to deliver outcomes for nature, water and society.

 

It takes account of feedback from a broad range of organisations across the East of England, including 945 discrete objectives and actions from 37 stakeholder organisations, to develop a shared vision for the restoration of nature.

 

It’s been developed using Systematic Conservation Planning, the international best-practice approach for landscape-level management of biodiversity, the environment and natural capital.

 

This important project also feeds into water resource management plans for the East of England and will help make sure that the changes in water management directly support the recovery of nature.

 

Developing a Responsible Business standard

 

Since 2019 we've worked with the British Standards Institute and a group of companies who share our commitment to responsible business to develop a Publicly Accessible Specification (PAS) on embedding purpose in organisations.

 

Our goal in developing the Responsible Business PAS has been to identify and set out the characteristics of a leading organisation that is pursuing a sustainable purpose and is building that into the core of their business.

 

As the lead sponsor we’ve worked with BSI and an advisory panel consisting of leading responsible businesses, academics, charities and sustainability organisations to produce PAS 808:2022 ‘Purpose-driven organisations – Worldviews, principles and behaviours for delivering sustainability’. Having gone through a full public consultation in late 2021, the final version is due to be published in July 2022. 

 

The Responsible Business PAS could play an important role in helping us hold ourselves to account by giving us – and others – a framework to assess our commitment.

 

Our Public Interest Commitment

 

We were a driving force in the development of the industry-wide Public Interest Commitment, made in April 2019 together with our fellow water companies through Water UK. It commits all companies to enshrining purpose – which we were the first to do through the changes we’ve made to our Articles of Association – and sets out five key goals to achieve by 2030:

 

  • triple the rate of sector-wide leakage reduction by 2030
  • make bills affordable as a minimum for all households with water and sewerage bills more than 5% of their disposable income by 2030 and develop a strategy to end water poverty
  • achieve net zero carbon emissions for the sector by 2030
  • prevent the equivalent of 4 billion plastic bottles ending up as waste by 2030
  • be the first sector to achieve 100% commitment to the Social Mobility Pledge.

 

We are playing a leading role on two of the industry-wide commitments, with our CEO Peter Simpson acting as co-sponsor of the leakage and net zero carbon goals. Our industry leadership on leakage reduction has seen us achieve rates of water loss per kilometre at half the national average, while on carbon reduction, we have played a leading role in the national debate on reaching net zero carbon emissions and in 2017 became the first UK utility to launch a Green Bond.

 

Our environmental, social and corporate governance

 

We believe it’s important to demonstrate through reporting how we put our social and environmental Purpose into action. You can read more, and find links to relevant reports here.

 

Get River Positive

 

We first set out our long-term goal to improve ecological quality across our catchments in 2007 and have worked with a wealth of partners over many years to help us do so. This year we’ve launched an ambitious new partnership with fellow water company Severn Trent, underpinned by five key pledges that set a framework for us to lead the charge in protecting and revitalising rivers in our respective regions.

 

Together, we’ve committed to ensure our storm overflows and water recycling centres do not harm rivers; to create more opportunities for people to enjoy our regions’ rivers; to support others to improve and care for rivers; to enhance our rivers and create new habitats so wildlife can thrive; and to be open and transparent about our performance and our plans. 
 

Our Values

 

Our sense of social and environmental Purpose extends to everything we do and everyone we employ. We have created a simple but powerful Values framework which gives us all a common goal – or North Star – to work towards. Find out more on our Values here.

 

Our sustainable financing

 

We have led the way in sustainable finance in the UK, making history in 2017 when we became the first European utility to issue a sterling Green Bond. Since then, we have funded hundreds of  capital investment projects through financing from Green Bonds and raised a total of £1.8 billion of sustainable finance. We’re very proud that thanks to our longstanding focus on sustainability, all of our capital investment meets the strict environmental criteria set for Green Bond funding.

 

The investments made through the Green Bonds issued to date are expected to save or avoid more than 179,000 tonnes of carbon –- a significant step towards our 2030 net zero carbon goal - and we've achieved a 63% reduction from our 2010 capital carbon baseline  See our net zero strategy for more on our ambitious carbon reduction plans.

 

Longer term, Anglian Water plans to secure the vast majority of its financing through sustainable frameworks.

 

Find out more here.

 

The Better Business Act

 

We’re proud supporters of the Better Business Act coalition (BBA), a business-led campaign supported by more than 1,000 UK companies. The BBA calls for a change to Section 172 of the Companies Act to require every medium and large company in the UK to align their activity with the interests of wider society and the environment, as we already do at Anglian Water.

 

We were delighted, in November 2021, to be awarded Best Use of Purpose as a Business Driver at the Strategic Comms Awards. Embedding consideration of our purpose into decision-making is critical to being able to deliver effectively against it.