Assessment of the pollution incident performance of water and sewerage companies in England

The project aimed to assess and compare the pollution incident performance of water and sewerage companies in England using the National Incident Reporting System (NIRS) dataset.

This was the first external analysis of the NIRS dataset, which was obtained through Environmental Information Regulations 2004 requests to the English Environment Agency. The objectives of the project were;

1) to determine the differences in pollution incident severity, frequency and origin across water and sewerage companies from 2010-2019;

2) to determine the degree of variation in pollution incident reporting by water and sewerage companies across different asset types;

3) to assess the probability of the public reporting pollution incidents not reported by water and sewerage companies; and 4) to determine if current environmental performance assessment pollution incident metric results are related to the operational conditions of the company.