{"id":"england-utility-performance","slug":"england-utility-performance","name":"England Water Company Performance Dataset","description":"Annual leakage, distribution input, per-capita consumption and metering for the appointed water companies in England, with the national figure alongside — the operational record of how much water each company puts into its network, how much it loses, and how much reaches people.","methodology":"Collected from the Environment Agency’s annual analysis of the water industry’s water resources performance, published on GOV.UK under the Open Government Licence. Figures are taken as the regulator publishes them, from the company-reported water balance, for the regulatory year running April to March. The report gives no captions or stable table order and restates its headings between editions, so tables are matched on heading text against an explicit list and anything unrecognised is skipped and reported rather than guessed at. Several measures are printed twice at different precision within one edition; those are reconciled to the finer printing where they agree after rounding, and left unresolved where they do not.","domains":["leakage","utility-performance"],"metricIds":["leakage-per-person","leakage-share-of-input","leakage-per-property","distribution-input-per-capita","household-consumption-per-capita","household-metering","non-household-metering"],"subjectScope":"Appointed water companies in England, plus the England-wide figure","cadence":"annual","version":"1.0.0","released":"2026-08-25","changelog":[{"version":"1.0.0","date":"2026-08-25","summary":"First release. English utilities move from a single leakage figure to eight indicators.","additions":["Leakage per person, per property and as a share of distribution input.","Distribution input per person, per-capita consumption, household and non-household metering."]}],"limitations":["Two regulatory years only. The Environment Agency has published two editions of this report, so this is a change rather than a trend: a single year-on-year movement can be weather, a revised water balance or a change in what the regulator asks for. It does not meet the three-indicators-over-five-years threshold a composite utility index would require, and no index is published from it.","Ofwat holds English company leakage back to 1992 — a far longer series. It is absent because ofwat.gov.uk refuses automated requests, not because its licence forbids reuse. Hydrionis publishes what its governed collection can retrieve rather than what could be retyped.","Leakage as a share of distribution input is not non-revenue water. Non-revenue water also counts apparent losses — meter under-registration, unauthorised consumption, data error — and unbilled authorised use such as firefighting. The two are routinely confused and differ materially.","Figures use the English regulatory year running April to March. They are not comparable with international non-revenue water percentages, which use a different denominator, nor with the French linear leakage index and network efficiency indicators Hydrionis also holds, which normalise by network length rather than by property or person.","Leakage normalised by person or property reflects household size, network density, pipe age, material, pressure and ground conditions as much as management. It ranks circumstances as well as performance, and Hydrionis publishes no league table from it."],"observationCount":234,"seriesCount":126,"subjectCount":18,"from":2023,"to":2024,"sourceIds":["uk-ea-water-resources"],"units":["%","l/person/day","l/property/day"],"redistributable":true,"commerciallyReusable":true,"citation":"Hydrionis (2026), England Water Company Performance Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/england-utility-performance/","downloads":[{"file":"/downloads/observations-utility-performance-uk-ea-water-resources.csv","format":"CSV","label":"utility-performance observations from EA water resources (108 rows)"},{"file":"/downloads/observations-leakage-uk-ea-water-resources.csv","format":"CSV","label":"leakage observations from EA water resources (90 rows)"},{"file":"/downloads/observations-sector-use-uk-ea-water-resources.csv","format":"CSV","label":"sector-use observations from EA water resources (36 rows)"}],"apiPath":"/api/v1/datasets/england-utility-performance.json","lastFetched":"2026-10-01","fields":[{"id":"leakage-per-person","name":"Leakage per person","definition":"Leakage divided by the resident population the company supplies, expressed per person per day.","unit":"l/person/day","nativeGeography":["utility-area"],"comparabilityNotes":"Normalising by population rather than by property shifts what the figure reflects: a company serving many small households will look worse per property and better per person than one serving few large ones. It is a different ranking of the same losses, not a better one."},{"id":"leakage-share-of-input","name":"Leakage as a share of distribution input","definition":"Leakage expressed as a percentage of the water the company put into its distribution system.","unit":"%","nativeGeography":["utility-area"],"comparabilityNotes":"A percentage of input falls when demand rises even if the losses themselves are unchanged, so it moves with consumption as well as with network condition. Compare a company against its own record before comparing it against another."},{"id":"leakage-per-property","name":"Leakage per property","definition":"Leakage divided by the number of connected properties.","unit":"l/property/day","nativeGeography":["utility-area"],"comparabilityNotes":"Normalising by property makes utilities comparable in a way absolute leakage does not, but still reflects network density, pipe age, material, pressure and ground conditions rather than management quality alone."},{"id":"distribution-input-per-capita","name":"Distribution input per person","definition":"Total water put into the distribution system divided by the population served, per person per day.","unit":"l/person/day","nativeGeography":["utility-area"],"comparabilityNotes":"A high figure can mean high consumption, high leakage or a large non-household base, and the three cannot be told apart from this number alone. Read it alongside per-capita consumption and leakage rather than as a demand measure."},{"id":"household-consumption-per-capita","name":"Household water use per person","definition":"Average volume of water used per person per day in the home.","unit":"l/person/day","nativeGeography":["utility-area","country"],"comparabilityNotes":"Definitions differ on whether supply pipe losses, garden use and non-household use on domestic meters are included. Metered and unmetered households also differ substantially, so a national average masks a wide distribution."},{"id":"household-metering","name":"Household metering","definition":"Share of household customers billed on a measured rather than an unmeasured tariff.","unit":"%","nativeGeography":["utility-area"],"comparabilityNotes":"Metering share is a policy and regulatory outcome as much as an operational one — companies in water-stressed areas have been permitted compulsory metering that others have not — so it ranks circumstances rather than performance."},{"id":"non-household-metering","name":"Non-household metering","definition":"Share of non-household customers billed on a measured tariff, excluding void properties.","unit":"%","nativeGeography":["utility-area"],"comparabilityNotes":"Reported excluding voids — properties connected but unoccupied — so it is not comparable with a figure that includes them. The exclusion is stated because including voids depresses the percentage by several points."}]}