For many years, the reporting of consumption in the water balance has been aligned, to various extents, with the process of billing customers. However, unlike many countries that closely monitor non-revenue water, billing in the UK is driven by fairness, transparency and the customer experience. Accurate quantification of company level consumption could be entirely separate and is motivated by water resources and regulatory commitments.
We believe these differences combined with smart metering offer the UK Water industry the opportunity to produce a world class water balance that will deliver robust results for decades to come. This will improve incentives and value for customers and help protect future water resources.
Artesia, alongside HRWallingford, recently undertook a project on behalf of Ofwat to review how smart metering can improve the quantification of consumption and night use in the Water Balance.
In this report we propose a bold new framework for measuring consumption with the concept of “Property water use” replacing customer use. In this framework, consumption is reported based on the best available data for each and every property, independently of whether the property is a household, non-household, measured, unmeasured or void. This approach is particularly beneficial for those companies with large numbers of customers receiving unmetered bills, since it allows them to be directly accounted for in the water balance.
With smart metering this means that within year consumption can be quantified exactly, with no accruals, billing cycles or tariff adjustments that can reduce the accuracy of reporting.
We introduce guidelines for the use of bulk metering to effectively measure the last 5-10% of customers that prevent the move to a fully measured water balance. For void properties we believe our framework offers the best method of accounting for consumption, which smart metering has demonstrated is often as high as occupied properties.
Our report to Ofwat is freely available online and will inform a consultation into leakage reporting in Summer 2026. Please do get in touch if you have any questions.
