Making a positive difference in our community

Our Community Principles

The Kelda Group provides local communities with much more than just high quality water and sewerage services.

We have an extensive engagement programme, providing support and help-in-kind to a wide variety of different organisations across the communities we serve. These partnerships are of enormous important to us in terms of forging stronger links and by making a tangible and positive difference to the quality of people's lives.

We provide this support in three key areas:

• Education - through educating young people and local communities on the value of what we do.
• Environment - playing a key role as one of Yorkshire's largest land owners in enhancing the natural and build environment.
• Empowerment - providing opportunities for our colleagues to share skills with the local community through employee supported volunteering.

We aim to do this by:

• Providing a range of educational visits into our industry, strongly aligned to the National Curriculum, through our education and outreach programme.
• Raising awareness of our capital investment programme through open days, customer events and community presentations.
• Educating customer groups through our campaign work on key issues relevant to the water industry.
• Supporting local communities through our employee supported volunteering programme.
• Providing financial support through our employee fundraising team to local and regional charities, and by offering Payroll Giving opportunities
• Recognising vulnerable customers through our Helping Hands register, providing guidance and support in respect of bill payment, and raising awareness of Bogus Caller issues.
• Communicating widely, where possible, throughout the delivery of capital investment work to deliver the best possible solution whilst minimising disruption to customers.
• Managing our impact on the local environment through our investments to coastal and river water quality, by reducing our carbon footprint, creating more of our own energy and by developing a plan to manage water supplies in the event of a drought.
• By developing sustainable environmental and community partnerships and through regular liaison with key stakeholders throughout the region and industry.

The Kelda Group does not partake in any commercial initiatives in the community.

Our Community Management Targets and Outturns for 2011/12 were:

1. Impact of our extensive capital investment programme

• Our media score target for 2011/12 was +20. We out-turned at +16.9.  Our work with media performed well in 11/12 and our target of 20 helped drive our focus in this key area which resulted in a upward shift in performance vs the previous year. However for 2012/13, we have revised this to a target of 15 which is still very positive but also more achievable.
• For social media we met our “high//high” (share of voice and sentiment) target.  Social media provides a really important and effective channel to engage with Yorkshire Communities around  the capital programme enabling us to have real-time dialogue with customers and helping better inform them and answer any specific questions that they have.
• For the bathing water project, we have worked collaboratively with the partnership to develop and agree joint action plans for the improvement of all Yorkshire’s bathing beaches, this has included a joint action plan for communications and engagement activities with local communities and stakeholders,  For example for Staithes we conducted joint public events, stakeholder visits, letters, a website and media releases.   We have also developed a dedicated partnership website.

2. Supporting customers in respect of price rises, affordability and water poverty by:-

• Contributing £678,000 to the Yorkshire Water Community Trust in 2011/12
• Enabling 3,400 customers to remain on the Resolve scheme, customers  made payments worth £891,000 through Resolve, and in turn the company  wrote of £1.4 million of outstanding debt during the financial year 2011/12.
• By providing the Watersure tariff to customers meeting the criteria.  During 2011/12, we had 4,234 customers on the Watersure tariff.

3. Creating greater awareness and building understanding of our services by:

• Offered an education programme, educational visits and speakers service to the community we serve.
• During 2011/12, 382 education visits were delivered to 7,149 customers.
• Our Green Classroom resource was issued to  308 schools – a total of 7459 booklets being issued across the region.
• Our Speakers attended 109 events, reaching an audience of over 6334 customers.
• Deliver a campaign to show customers the problems that they could cause to their homes by the incorrect disposal of fats, oils and grease. 24,500 packs were given away at city centre events and nearly 7000 fat cakes were requested.
• Encouraging our customers  to use more water wisely as part of our Saving Water One Step at A Time campaign was delivered by distributing 40,000 water saving packs to customers at city centre events
• Getting our customers to prepare their homes for winter to protect against frozen pipes was a key campaign this year. 7,000 winter packs were requested within two weeks of the campaign going live, 22% of customers recalled having seen, received or heard something about the campaign and 20,000 people visited the web pages.

4. Demonstrating our large environmental responsibilities, sustainability and conservation by:

• Continue development plans at Scammonden Water in conjunction with Kirklees Council and Pennine Prospects
• Review of existing promoted walks to ensure they are fit for purpose, safe and waymarked
• Surfacing of identified car parks
• Review of car park capacity and fit for purpose at Langsett Woods
• Continue to manage the Yorkshire woodland holding to meet the UKWAS, FSC accreditation standard
• Creation of an artificial Sand Martin bank, Osprey nest site and continued management of meadows, water bodies and woodlands at Tophill Low Nature Reserve

5. Attracting and recruiting from a diverse talent pool by:

• Introducing an apprenticeship scheme into the Kelda Group.
  During 2011/12,  15  apprentices were recruited into the company (original target – 15)
• Continuing the graduate scheme within the Kelda Group.
  During 2011/12, 9 graduates were recruited into the company (original target – 9)

Our community management targets are reviewed annually during our business planning process.

These targets are in the public domain, stating target and outturn for 2011/12.

Key publications

Yorkshire Water Services Ltd Annual Report (Year ended 31 March 2012)
(PDF, 13.3MB)

Kelda Holdco Ltd Annual Report (Year ended 31 March 2012)
(PDF, 1.6MB)