Scottish Water: Expanding customer choice to support a flourishing Scotland

As of 1 April 2021, developer customers can take advantage of a new service offering from Scottish Water aimed at making it easier for you to get on with your business of helping Scotland flourish and ensuring its network assets comply with its quality standards.

In simple terms, if the domestic requirements of what you are building means there needs to be an enhancement to existing network assets, which is not readily attributable to you and your development, then you will be able to choose that Scottish Water makes this enhancement, instead of doing it yourself and being reimbursed by it afterwards. Additional non-domestic requirement and enhancements readily attributable to you and your development will continue to be funded by you as normal.

This latest improvement to Scottish Water’s service offering gives you greater choice and flexibility. It enables you to either continue to procure and deliver this service yourself via your own supply chain or you can choose that Scottish Water does this work for you. This now provides it with the ability to improve the service it offers to you and gives more choice over what assets are wanted for the future to meet aspirations around Net Zero, customer service and financial sustainability.

Helping Scotland flourish

As businesses that are constructing new homes and renovating exiting ones, for the people of Scotland, you will find most of these properties need to be connected to Scottish Water’s water and wastewater networks. Its Development Services Team works with you to ensure that its relevant assets and the network have both the availability and capability to deal with the domestic element of any new development. 

Scottish Water understand the future demands for water and wastewater capacity across Scotland and seeks to ensure those demands can be met by promoting the right investment, in the right places, at the right time. It also works with customers, like you, who wish to develop properties, co-ordinating the connections process from planning through to final connection and to ensure that assets are constructed to the right standards, so they can be vested by us.

As of 1 April, any enhancements to Scottish Water existing network assets for domestic requirements not readily attributable to a particular developer will continue to be funded through a combination of reasonable cost contribution (where applicable) and infrastructure charges or alternatively fully funded through infrastructure charges. This will include the domestic requirements of all developments that are included within a strategic network impact assessments (SNIA), however, you will now have a choice on who undertakes the delivery of enhancing Scottish Water’s existing network assets identified within a SNIA. This will mean an increase to its infrastructure charge, payable at the same time as the connection charge, but will give you greater certainty when procuring your sites and in most cases remove the need for you to undertake off-site enhancement of our existing network assets.

You will continue to deliver enhancements of Scottish Water’s existing network assets for domestic requirements where this is not identified within a SNIA (i.e., a standalone network impact assessment where the enhancement is readily attributable to a particular developer.) These enhancements will continue to be eligible for reasonable cost contribution but will not be eligible for additional infrastructure charges funding. Additional non-domestic requirements will continue to be funded by the developer.

Scottish Water said it is delighted to be launching this new service offering as it aims to help simplify the responsibilities between it and a developer, improve the visibility, planning and viability of development sites and enable it to continue to protect its networks while enabling Scotland to flourish.

If you would like more information, please contact the Strategic Development Department at:   StrategicDevelopmentDepartment@scottishwater.co.uk