About us

Stakeholder engagement

To deliver the high levels of service our customers rightly demand, it is essential that we understand and respond to the views and expectations of our stakeholders.

To ensure close and effective liaison with all our stakeholders, we listen to their views on our proposals and, where possible, change what we do to accommodate their feedback.

This is critical if we are to deliver successfully our current largest ever investment programme, while building support for an even bigger programme from 2010 to 2015.

Our Stakeholder Engagement team manages communications for major engineering works, liaises with local, regional and national government and oversees public consultation exercises.

Project communications

Our project communications experts keep customers and stakeholders informed about the rationale for our engineering works, how they will be affected, and what we are doing to minimise disruption.

Examples of projects include our Victorian mains replacement programme in London and schemes to protect homes and businesses from sewer flooding across our region.

Communication channels depend on the project, but include 'drop-in' sessions for local people, the distribution of leaflets and letters to customers and, for larger projects, briefings for business customers to attend.

Our communication strategy for our Victorian mains replacement programme in London has been recognised by the Department for Transport as an example of best practice in communicating street works management.

Find out more about our current projects

Policy makers and elected representatives

We do not have any political affiliation as an organisation and have a strict policy that we do not make political donations of any sort.

But policy makers and elected representatives have a significant influence on our operating environment so we aim to build and maintain close relationships with them to inform and influence their decisions in an open and transparent way.

We meet many of the 135 MPs in our region individually to talk about projects affecting their constituencies, and consulted more than 30 of our MPs and MEPs to ensure their expectations were reflected in our 25-year business plan.

We have also held discussions with government officials about the impact of the new Planning Bill on two of our most significant planned projects: the Tideway Tunnel and Upper Thames Reservoir.

Local and regional government

We work closely with key stakeholders in local and regional government to ensure we deliver the commitments in our regulatory contract.

We have developed further relationships with many authorities in our region, focusing on those where our engineering works and major sites are based.

These authorities include the City of Westminster, City of London Corporation, London Boroughs of Newham, Hammersmith and Fulham, Wandsworth, Greenwich, Bexley, and Croydon, Oxford City Council, Oxfordshire County Council, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, and Swindon Borough Council.

We also worked closely with London Councils, the Greater London Authority, the Association of Councils of the Thames Valley Region and Transport for London.

These relationships have helped us to understand better the priorities and challenges our stakeholders face, to improve the way we work together.

We will continue to build on these existing relationships and develop others.

Public consultation

We have increased our focus on public consultation work to ensure our future plans reflect customer and stakeholder views.

To draw up our 25-year business plan, we carried out extensive research and our largest ever public consultation.

The company is a member of the Consultation Institute and follows Cabinet Office best practice guidelines for consultation, aiming to make our consultation as open and transparent as possible.

Our approach includes independently facilitated stakeholder workshops, discussions with MPs, workshops with domestic customers and independently hosted.

David Bland OBE, Chair of the Consumer Council for Water in London and the South East, says in his foreword to Taking Care of Water, our Strategic Direction Statement for 2010 - 2035, that:

"...it is particularly important that water and sewerage companies show strong empathy with the wishes and reasonable aspirations of their customers. In the consultation leading to this publication, Thames Water has spent a lot of time trying to get a clear view of where customers' priorities lie...".