NOTE OF MEETING with JANE SIMPSON Director of Commercial, Engineering and Capital Delivery for UNITED UTLITIES
25 October 2024
(pic above shows Jane with Club members John Slinn and Stephen Chaytow)
The headlines scream at us as OfWat fines water companies for sewage spills while keeping their charges down. We face increasing floods, as the Environment Agency and DEFRA wring their hands. The Drinking Water Inspectorate does what it says on the tin, and the Consumer Council for Water, Natural England, and the UK Health Security Agency are all taking a view. Fresh legislation in 2021 set up the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), making life harder, while planning permission for essential infrastructure is a nightmare. You might be thinking that the water industry, privatised in 1989, is somewhat over-regulated and under-resourced, for a whole variety of reasons. You may well be right.
With an increased population, climate change, and fiercer campaigning against pollutants, you get an idea of the challenges faced by the water companies, even though they’ve actually made enormous progress in recent decades – our rivers are far LESS polluted than they were (see below *).
Jane Simpson was headhunted to her current significant role where she manages a £1.6bn budget, and as she sketched how she got there, we were filled with admiration. She left school at 16 and became an apprentice at GEC, eventually gaining degrees in electrical and electronic engineering from Coventry, Birmingham and Cambridge. Then: “I married Bart Simpson” she told us – that’s her real husband’s real name. From GEC she migrated to British Rail which morphed into Network Rail where her responsibilities were national; over a 20 year period, having started when there were no female toilets, she became their Chief Engineer.
In 2016 she joined Severn Trent, then moved to Royal Mail as Ops Director, trying to mechanise this highly unionised business. Perhaps it was a relief to move in 2022 to United Utilities, where at least the view out of the car window could be one of the three National Parks where the company finds its catchment areas for fresh water.
Even if it’s regional, it’s a massive operation. Over 5,000 employees. 43,000km of water pipes (many still made of lead from Victorian times), 79,000km of waste water pipes, over 54 % of which are combined sewer overflows (CSOs) – intended as a safety valve when heavy rain overburdens sewage works, they can discharge into rivers and coastlines. The alternative is that sewage would back up into our homes. The business manages 170 reservoirs and 56,000 hectares of catchment land, as 90% of our local water comes off hillsides including Helvellyn in the Lake District, which supplies Manchester, and Vyrnwy in Wales, for Liverpool and Warrington.
Our north-west region poses other complications. There’s more “water poverty” here than in other regions – people struggling to pay their bills, so over half a billion pounds to help is set aside in the current plan submitted to OfWat. We have a lot more rain, being in the west, and a lot more extreme rainfall, with increasing frequency of “freak” events. The 2019 Toddbrook dam breach (not one of their, it’s Canal & River Trust) was the result of two such freak weather events in the space of a week. The north-west especially Manchester also has economic growth, leading to an increased demand from both households and businesses.
The latest clean-up programme runs from 2025 to 2029, but Jane’s team have received permission to get cracking early. So right now they are upgrading 950km of old pipes, aiming at a 60% reduction in storm overflow spills by 2030, and a 25% reduction in the number of pollution incidents, alongside reducing nutrients in over 500km of rivers. Upgrading existing sewage works doesn’t come cheap – £20m spent at Glossop, £12m at Furness Vale, £13m at Chapel. She showed pictures of the massive new storm tanks being installed – basically, underground concrete bunkers – to even out the flow; they’re grassed over so their presence is hidden. Two locally will be at Chapel and Tintwistle. She didn’t mention if they have hydro-electric capabilities, which perhaps they should. But here are some glaring obstacles. While supporting 30,000 jobs in the region and creating 7,000 new roles, there is a real skills shortage in the north-west. Unsurprisingly Jane is a strong supporter of apprenticeships – this year her section has taken on 49 apprentices – and says she has “some of the most amazing engineers working for me.” To me, perhaps that number should be higher, with the kind of effort Barratts Developments puts in to training and holding on to apprentices in housebuilding (see the meeting with them in October 2021). The other technical problem is not so easily solved: in Liverpool for example, nearly all the drains are CSOs. “We can’t dig up the whole city in one go!” she points out. Doing it without immense disruption implies it’ll take many years to complete.
What’s also lacking is understanding amongst the public of the job they do, the massive challenges described above, and how we thoughtlessly make things harder. The fact that we put wet wipes and sanitary items down the loo; that cafés regularly tip waste down the drain, causing fatbergs; that more housing means more water demand and fewer soakaways as everything gets tarmacked, and that we now regularly build on flood plains. She described efforts in schools to educate on these issues, and a scheme in Tintwistle targetting cooking oil and wet wipes. But .. this all seemed a bit piece-meal.
If you’re going to educate the public, do it properly. Not by hectoring ads, but by taking schoolchildren to see a sewage farm, understand how it works, and what messes it up. By taking local people to see renovation works – not just the local MP! – and engaging as the C&RT have done over the Toddbrook restoration, with regular updates, newsletters, exhibitions and visits. Inviting in the press, regularly, so they can appreciate as we did what water companies can and can’t do. This needs a dedicated team with a full programme aimed at 100% coverage, not piecemeal engagement. Otherwise you’re always fighting off criticism, and that can be costly.
When Jane submitted their £3billion CSO planned programme recently, OfWat returned it with a price tag of only £1.5bn. Really? Jane fired off “a 400 page response”, pointing out the technical issues in the northwest, and how our requirements are different from the easier geography and geology down south. The public response is to worry about their bills, but if we want cleaner water and higher standards, it’ll cost – and most of the money (55%) comes from investors, who see United Utilities as a sound investment.
I think they are right, but acquiring a better reputation as well as more money should be high on the water companies’ agenda. With Jane they have one of the finest engineers this country has produced in recent years, and they should be asking her how to do it.
*For details on how much cleaner our rivers are, see: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-water-environment-indicator-b3-supporting-evidence/state-of-the-water-environment-long-term-trends-in-river-quality-in-england
And if you’ve never seen a fatberg, try this 200-tonne monster under Liverpool recently: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-57203734