Applications for assistance performance commitment data

What are performance commitments (PCs)?

The water regulator Ofwat sets targets called performance commitments (PCs) to ensure companies deliver the best possible service for customers, society and the environment. Wessex Water has a range of PCs for the2020-25 period.

Each year we report our results against these commitments, in our Annual Performance Report.

Where appropriate we’re publishing the data underpinning calculation of the PCs – you can find our other PC datasets in the Performance Commitments section.

Applications for assistance PC

We believe that water use should not be rationed by a customer’s ability to pay – no one should be in water poverty. So we offer a variety of tailored solutions to help customers manage their water bills. These include flexible payment plans, ‘Restart’ – our debt support scheme, and long-term support tariffs such as a discount for low-income pensioners.

We partner with debt advice agencies such as Citizens Advice to help us raise awareness of these schemes and increase the number of customers who have access to them. We provide funding to advice agencies for every successful application we receive. An application is deemed successful when it leads to the customer being accepted on to one or more of our affordability schemes.

The applications for assistance PC reports the total number of these successful applications to our affordability schemes from funded advice agencies in each reporting year. If a customer is accepted onto more than one scheme, they are only counted once.

This performance commitment incentivises us to work in effective partnership with the advice sector to increase access to our financial support schemes.

Dataset details

The dataset provides details of the successful applications received in each reporting year.

How was this data collated?

Debt advice agencies provide us with quarterly data confirming the details of those that they have helped with water bills. We check this against our records and agree a final number with each agency. We collate these agreed numbers for all agencies and quarters to produce our annual reporting to Ofwat. The published dataset is an extract from this list, with the agency name anonymised.

Data quality

Sometimes organisations merge during the reporting year. In the published dataset these organisations have been treated as merged for the entire reporting year, in order to ensure the anonymity of the organisations. (Otherwise, a significant increase or reduction in applications would be apparent and these patterns could lead to identification.)

Publish frequency

For the remaining years of the 2020-25 period, an additional year of data will be added after the annual reporting period.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments about this data set, please get in touch via opendata@wessexwater.co.uk

Terms of use

This dataset is licensed under CC BY, an open data licence, to make it freely available to other potential customers, stakeholders or interested organisations.

Supplementary information

For those keen to develop a deeper understanding of this dataset, the following additional reading is suggested:

• Affordability page on Wessex Water’s corporate website: Affordability | Wessex Water
• Bill support information on Wessex Water’s customer: Help to pay your bill | Wessex Water