Customers should have easier access to information about their water company’s performance. That’s why we created Water Mark. This is our assessment of how well water companies are performing in the areas that customers care about the most. Water Mark contains information on customers’ views, complaints and operational performance (pdf)(excel). To demonstrate how well each company has performed, each area has been compared and graded. Find out how we do this here.

If you’re unsure who supplies your water, you can find out by entering your postcode on the Water UK website.

Download the full Water Mark table (pdf)

Overall service

Customers have told us that they are generally pleased with the overall service provided by their water and sewerage companies. In the last year, we’ve seen increases in customer satisfaction with value for money and bill fairness, which is promising progress, but we’d like to see continued efforts across the industry in this area. We have previously published top tips including some quick wins that companies can adopt to help drive increases in value for money and fairness.

Affordability of bills

We have also seen a positive increase in the number of customers that are telling us that their bills are affordable. But we know that there are still many that struggle to pay their water bills and individual circumstances can change quickly. That is why in May, we published our findings from our independent review of water affordability, which sets out a number of recommendations that will help to eradicate water poverty.

We have been delighted with the positive feedback that this has received, and steps are already in place to put these recommendations into practice. One thing that we are particularly keen to see is comprehensive support available to financially vulnerable households wherever they live, through the introduction of a single social tariff scheme across England and Wales.

We would also like to see companies contribute more of their own money to the funding of financial support, building on the good practice demonstrated by United Utilities, Yorkshire Water and Dŵr Cymru in assisting those struggling to pay by using their own company profits to help fund social tariffs.

Engaging with customers

The area where water companies have the most work to do is improving how they engage with customers to make sure they know that additional help is available when and if they need it.

We’ve seen companies making strides in this area over the last few years, but we’d like to see even more engagement around the additional help that companies offer. We know that there are certain communities who find it more difficult to access information about financial support. This includes people in minority ethnic groups, those with language barriers, the digitally excluded, disabled people and those with lower-level literacy skills.

This is why we have launched our ‘Your Water, Your Way’ campaign, designed to help get the message across to those most vulnerable in society. Through our campaign we aim to:

• Raise public awareness of priority services and financial support
• Ensure satisfactory communication for everyone during incidents
• Empower people to know and use their rights.

Find out more about the work we are doing with companies through this campaign

Resolving customer complaints

We assess how well water companies have responded to their customers’ complaints in our annual Complaints Report. Throughout the year, we work closely with all water companies and retailers to help improve the customer complaints journey, and through this we have been sharing best practice with companies to help them reduce the number of customers who feel the need to complain. We have already started to see improvement and evidence that this collaborative work has led to positive results, and we are looking forward to seeing more improvements as the year progresses.

Getting services right

Finally, Water Mark considers how well companies are performing on areas of operational performance; in other words, how good they are at keeping our taps running and taking away our waste water.

If anything goes wrong in these areas, the impact on people’s lives and homes can be severe. Our assessment is a comparative one – it looks at how well companies perform when compared to each other. In many of these areas, companies have set their own targets and while they may have met these targets, they still might not be performing as well as the industry leaders.

You can find more information about how companies have performed against their targets in individual company performance reports published on company websites.