Our assurance information

What's the purpose of our assurance process?

Customers and other stakeholders expect that the information we present to them about our performance is accurate, accessible and fully assured. In completing our assurance plan, we have engaged with our stakeholders and will continue to do so to give confidence in the information we publish.

This assurance also provides legitimacy to our reported performance and the delivery of promises made in our business plans. By carrying out this assurance planning each year, we'll continue to build a greater level of trust and confidence in our reporting.

Key takeaways

Following past failings in the quality of our reporting, we continue to make improvements to ensure our regulators and other stakeholders can trust our data. These improvements have been led by our Risk and Assurance team, which ensures reporting to our regulators is subject to sustained internal review and appropriate assurance.

Our Final Assurance Plan is published annually in March. In it, we detail our approach to assurance in relation to our performance information. We also acknowledged the importance of accurate information in building trust and confidence.

We've adopted the ‘three lines of defence’ framework for our reporting governance and assurance activity. This framework helps to assure performance information by applying multiple levels of control. You can see a detailed explanation of this in Appendix 1 of the Data Assurance Summary.

Ultimately, all assurance activity has oversight from the Board and Audit Committee. The Audit Committee monitors the assurance over the integrity of our non-financial information reported by us in fulfilment of our regulatory, legal and environmental obligations. This includes information required by Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Environment Agency. The assurance plans are approved by the Audit Committee, which is responsible for overseeing and challenging the effectiveness of our approach.