Our charges

If you are involved in property development and you require new connections to our water or wastewater networks, then these changes will have affected you. Customers affected will fall broadly in to a number of groups:

• large companies constructing many new properties per year
• small and medium sized building firms
• individuals building a new property for themselves (self-build); redeveloping an existing property or connecting an existing property for the first time, or
• companies that provide infrastructure for developers, such as Self Lay Providers (SLP) and New Appointees (NAVs).

From 1 April 2018, water and sewerage companies were required to follow new charging rules, set by our regulator Ofwat. This meant that many of our charges have become fixed, enabling developers, SLPs and NAVs to calculate a reasonable estimate of their costs for our services before making an application to connect.

Fixed charges now apply to many of our new connection services, including:

• Connecting individual properties to water and wastewater networks
• The provision of new water mains networks
• The adoption of self-laid water and wastewater infrastructure

Developers are liable to pay us infrastructure charges when they connect their new properties to our networks for the first time (or reconnect properties that have been disconnected for longer than five years). From April 2018, our infrastructure charges have reduced and will remain at the same level until 31 March 2020.

Where new water mains are required for a development site, we offset the cost of the new mains by accounting for the future income we expect to receive from the occupiers of the new buildings. This is known as “income offsetting”.

In April 2018, we changed how we calculate the income offset amount, and this affects:

• the asset payment made to SLPs when they provide the new water mains for developments
• the payment made to NAVs when they connect new properties to our network via their networks
• the ‘discount’ that is applied to the cost of new water mains if we are asked to provide them

We have also changed the way we calculate the income offset where we are asked to provide new sewers for a development.

Please see our comprehensive Charging Arrangements downloads below. We also have a document setting out transitional arrangements for those developments that were already in progress, or were due to progress, between 1 February 2018 and 31 March 2018.