Decision Report 201302011

Summary

Mrs C complained that Scottish Water had failed to consult the public about planned work to the water supply in her area and that since this reduction in the water pressure, equipment in her house and her central heating boiler were not working properly. She said that it was unreasonable for Scottish Water to reduce the pressure, rather than repairing or replacing pipes and upgrading the mains for which they were responsible.

Our investigation found no evidence that Scottish Water had a requirement to consult their customers about this work. It had been undertaken in stages, and Scottish Water told us that the majority of their customers in the area would not have noticed any change. We did consider whether it would be appropriate to ask Scottish Water to consider consulting in future but they told us that a problem had been reported in only a handful of cases, and that they had followed these up and either taken action or provided advice to the customer where it was a matter for them to resolve.

We found that Scottish Water had chosen to reduce the pressure because they considered that there were a number of benefits from this. We found nothing to suggest that there was anything wrong with their decision-making in this respect. In Mrs C's case, she had been provided with additional support, and as Scottish Water had found that the problems she was experiencing were related to water flow rather than pressure, they had installed new pipe work from the main pipe to the boundary of her property, and had reimbursed her for the costs of engaging a plumber to fix an issue with her sanitary ware.