We launched a £20 million campaign to reduce leaks across our 13,700km of water mains.

We increased our leak detection team by 50 per cent to nearly 200 staff and began a programme to replace more than 50km of water mains.

We repaired a record number of more than 22,000 leaks despite the harsh winter. The extremely cold weather led to an exceptional number of burst pipes and we repaired 495 in December compared with 269 in November.

Although we missed our leakage target for the year, we still have one of the lowest leakage levels per property of the UK water and wastewater companies.

In 2010, we launched our metering programme to install water meters for the majority of homes we supply in the South East.

Our new meters include alarms, which are triggered by leaks on customers’ private supply pipes or leaks on pipes and dripping taps inside homes. These account for a fifth of all leakage and, to help reduce this, we will repair, free of charge, three supply pipe leaks per household.