Our charges

Charges for our services to support new development

If you are involved in building new properties you may ask us to carry out work for you to provide new water supplies and take away the wastewater from your new development.  Here you will find information about our charges for the work we do to help you to get connected to our water and wastewater networks.  Our charging information is relevant to:

• 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).

Since April 2018 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.

The way that we charge is changing from 1 April 2020

We’ll be making changes to the way we charge for new connections from 1 April 2020 as a consequence of new charging rules that have been implemented by our regulator, Ofwat.

There are to be no income offsets for requisitioned water mains and sewers in the future. This means:

• When a developer requisitions water mains or sewers from us they will be charged the full cost
• When a developer asks an SLP to construct water mains we will no longer make an asset payment (equal to the income offset amount)
• When a NAV constructs water mains or sewers we will no longer make a payment equal to the income offset amount

This will result in a significant increase the charges developers pay us in relation to new water mains and requisitioned sewers from 1 April 2020 compared to the last two years.

We have been reviewing how much revenue we need from developer customers to fund reinforcement to our networks to support new development growth.  As a consequence we are reducing our infrastructure charges.  Since 2018 we have:

• Reduced our water infrastructure from £365 per house to £135
• Reduced our wastewater infrastructure charge from £365 per house to £235

You can read about these changes in more detail in our document entitled “NWG Charging Arrangements 2020/21 – Developer Services” which is supported by our Transitional Arrangements document.

Our “Statement of significant changes in charges for new connections and new developments for 2020/21” includes examples showing how charges have changed for typical developments affected by the changes in charging approach since 2018.