Product quality and management systems

We are committed to delivering clean, reliable water to the communities we serve, using innovation and best practices to achieve our quality standards.

Product quality

Water is a vital need for everyone on the planet. It’s critically important that we make sure the water we provide to the 8 million people in our region is clean, safe to drink, and available when they need it.

We love bringing our wonderful product to millions of our customers every day. Which is why our teams work incredibly hard, 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year to make sure our customers’ taps continue to flow and their waste water is safely taken away.

We continue to invest in our people and infrastructure, so we can secure the safe distribution and treatment of water for generations to come.

Delivering increased water quality

We’re always looking for ways to improve the quality of our product and services, and we’re committed to reducing the number of drinking water quality complaints. To achieve this we’ve invested to improve and maintain our highest priority water treatment processes, as well as refurbish or rebuild our highest priority service reservoirs.

Our dedicated mains flushing team have proactively flushed over 1,400 distribution areas in 2020, helping to reduce the number of customers that experience discoloured water.

We carry this out to remove naturally occurring sediment in pipes. When the fire service uses our hydrants or water leaks due to burst pipes, it can cause the sediment to be lifted into the supply – making the water discoloured. By flushing the pipes we’ll help remove the build-up and reduce the chance of discolouration for our customers.

Through our water quality improvement programs we’ve delivered a 8.9% year on year improvement in drinking water complaints in 2020/21. By continuing our improvement work we are targeting a 7% reduction in water quality complaints by 2025. 

Quality management system

We’re constantly looking for ways we can improve efficiency and best practice in all that we do, and we’re very proud to have received several industry accreditations in this area.

In 2017 we established a Quality Management System and began a three year assurance plan to complete end-to-end audits of all of our 17 major Water Treatment Works, as well as our key central business functions.

In 2020 we added end-to-end audits of the Ground water sites to the assurance plan. This programme has highlighted best practice that we’ve shared within the Water Treatment teams and used on projects to improve effectiveness of our processes.

Our Quality Management System has been certified to the ISO9001:2015 Quality Management standard since March 2017. 

It covers:

We received our competent operator scheme certification in August 2019, providing assurance that all individual operators are assessed and receive the necessary training prior to them being declared as competent and authorised to work.

The Competent Operator Scheme was created by Water UK and the Drinking Water Inspectorate in 2005.

Its purpose is to make sure every licensed water operator is working to minimum standards of good practice and compliance. 

Our operational control centre looks after our water and waste network, ensuring water is always on supply to our customers. Our operational control centre is certified to follow the standards and guidelines in ISO9001.

This ensures the centre has a framework for continual progression and that the skills of department staff are continually evaluated. The certification ensures clear accountability through internal and external auditing, with continuous improvement actions in areas of the highest environmental risk.

Our in-house laboratories and sampling team hold ISO17025 accreditation.

This covers the collection of clean water samples, and the biological and chemical testing we carry out. This makes sure we take samples that are representative of our product, and provides assurance about the accuracy and validity of the analysis we carry out. 

Severn Trent Green Power

Our Green Power business is ISO 14001 CERTIFIED and the sites are ISOQAR to ensure we are consistently in compliance with these standards.

Green power