Mid Kent Holdings plc Companies

Today, Mid Kent Water supplies over 563,000 people with an average of over 160 million litres of high quality water every day. Our responsibility is to provide an uninterrupted supply of safe, clean water in an area of steadily increasing population and strong industrial development. This is a challenge because Kent is one of the driest counties in England, water resources are limited, and we are committed to protecting the environment. The Company serves an area filled with outstanding Kent landscapes and works hard to protect its sites in areas of natural beauty.

Our top priorities are the prudent management of a scarce resource and major investment in sophisticated technology to ensure a continuous supply of water to all our customers. We have invested heavily in reducing leakage with detection systems that can accurately pinpoint most leaks in our pipes by remote monitoring. The Company’s leakage detection team is now saving 14.1 million litres of water a day. To put that into perspective, that’s enough to supply the combined populations of Ashford and Canterbury.

It is essential to be able to forecast accurately short-term and long-term demand and the pattern of consumption of water by our customers. That is why we have pioneered state-of-the-art computer modelling to help us to obtain this valuable information and to ensure that there is sufficient water to satisfy customers’ future demands. In addition, careful monitoring of our boreholes and their performance is helping to increase the efficiency of their yield.

The future
Planning for the future is crucial for the Company and this is an essential part of our responsibilities.

Availability of cheap sources of water in our area is coming to an end, coinciding with an increasing demand for water both from existing customers and from newcomers and new businesses. Strong economic growth, new housing and the changing lifestyle of customers has led to ever-increasing consumption of water. Mid Kent Water has to make sure that it can balance this demand for more water with the available supplies in the area
without affecting the environment.

That is why the Company has already invested in a mains refurbishment programme, including 25 kilometres of renewed mains and used the most modern techniques to scrape and line over 116 kilometres of its pipes during the last five years. We still have a long way to go.

We have to ensure that, as far as possible, we have sufficient water supplies available for our customers even in a drought. The summer 2000 Drought Contingency Plan was produced in autumn 1999. This lays out in detail the way in which the Company would deal with all aspects of a potential drought. This has been submitted to the Environment Agency in accordance with DETR requirements.

Mid Kent Water believes that the common sense solution to scarcity is to control demand for existing water supplies, to make much more efficient use of water and to invest in reducing leaks, wastage and over-consumption.

The new Thanington water treatment plant in Canterbury is Mid Kent Water’s largest. It was commissioned during the year, on time and on budget under the supervision of the group’s engineering consultancy, Halcrow Water Services, replacing a plant which in part dated back to the early 1900s.

In February, Mid Kent Water commissioned a new control room at its Snodland headquarters. Controller Darren Fawcett and Graphical Information Systems Manager David Smith are using state-of-art remote telemetry to monitor and control an operational site.