Help in place for those in need

Little could have prepared us for the challenges facing us when we sent our teams to work from home in March 2020. The water sector works in 5-year cycles, and we had spent over 18 months preparing for the new cycle that was starting on 1st April 2020, only to find that everything had been turned on its head:

• Businesses forced to close, furlough their employees, or worse, make them redundant – particularly so in the hospitality, retail and leisure sectors
• People with underlying medical conditions were instructed to shield
• Many public services had to move to a virtual provision, a poor substitute in area such as social care and health.
• Approximately 45,000 businesses were forced to close as a result of the lockdown restrictions

All of which created a greater sense of financial uncertainty for many of our customers.

In Welsh Water, when the pandemic started, we were only part way through recruiting the new team that we were setting up to provide a single ‘case managed’ service to households needing financial assistance and priority services.

If I was worried about how we could respond to COVID, I shouldn’t have been. My team and our friends in our fantastic network of partner organisations (now numbering over 300) have shown just what can be achieved in the face of such adversity:

• Within a week of the lockdown restrictions coming into place, we had set up a dedicated online and telephone help facility offering assistance (such as payment holidays or lower payment options) to customers that were facing financial difficulties as a result of the pandemic. At the same time, we stopped billing those businesses that had been forced to close
• Our social tariff scheme, HelpU, was redesigned to allow us to increase capacity by 70,000 for the next 2 years
• Our Specialist Support Team was in place by June 2020 – all recruited and trained virtually.
• We reached agreement with Welsh Government to receive property level information (no sensitive personal data) of over 300,000 households where there was someone that had been instructed to shield. We established a temporary priority services register (PSR), which would ensure that in the event of a loss of supply, these households would have a guarantee of bottled water and not have to leave the safety of their homes.
• This temporary PSR information was then shared with Newport Council in advance of Storm Bella in December 2020, allowing them to identify the homes of vulnerable residents that might be at risk of flooding and arrange for them to be evacuated.
• This work with Welsh Government has now been formalised and Welsh Water is the first utility company to be part of their multi agency priority services data sharing platform (JIGSO)
• One of the biggest challenges has been continuing our community-based activities. Whilst not significant in terms of numbers of people that we see, our presence at Job Centres, Community Housing Associations and other events allows us to meet customers with representatives that they know well and trust. For some people, talking to your water company is something to dread and a trusted partner can make it less intimidating. However, our Promotions Team, with our partner organisations, successfully adapted this to the new virtual world and allowed us to continue with this really important area of our work.

This weeks event was the 4th that we have held since 2019 and the theme was ‘Working Together’. We were lucky enough to have speakers from Pobl Group, Citizens Advice, National Energy Action, Betsi Cadwalladr Health Board and our Customer Challenge Group, sharing experiences and the good work being done to help people navigate the challenges arising from the impacts of Covid, the record high energy price cap, rising food prices, the introduction of the Health and Social Care levy and the withdrawal of the £20 uplift to Universal Credit.

It was a great reset for me – listening to our speakers and the questions from the audience, I could see the passion which exists across our network of partners to make a meaningful difference to our customers. No single organisation has the answer (or the resources) to address the impact of all of this. However, what we have learnt over the last 2 years is just how much we can achieve when we bring together our people, resources and knowledge.

More details of the financial assistance and priority services support that Welsh Water provides can be found via our website here.