Nottingham City Council will start supplying water to its own estate next month – with responsibility handed to its energy services team.
Having acquired a self-supply licence, enabling it to buy water directly from Severn Trent at wholesale rates, the council hopes to cut bills and increase resource efficiency.
The council estimates it will save £64,000 a year.
The energy services team is also launching a water efficiency loan scheme (WELS), which will invest in water efficiency projects across the council’s estate. It hopes to save a further 10 per cent a year via the scheme. Nottingham CC said it will use the savings to protect front line services for local people.
Deputy Leader, Councillor Sally Longford, said: “Becoming a water self-supplier is an exciting next step for us as we seek to further reduce costs through innovative resource efficiency across our own estate.
As a large consumer of water, we are looking forward to having more control over this vital resource and will be looking for ways to use water more efficiency to lower costs and improve our environmental performance. We can streamline the service, cut out the margin that goes to others in the supply chain and plough the savings back into further resource efficiency projects.”
Wayne Bexton, head of Energy Services at Nottingham City Council, said the move makes “business and financial sense” and said his team is “extremely proud to be the first council to run its own water service in-house”.
He added: “The reduction of operating costs for the council allows us to share the benefits with our citizens by investing in further innovative projects to better our services. The move also supports our wider ambition of becoming a carbon neutral city by 2028.”
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