Assurance transformation plan helps Northumbrian Water meet new reporting requirements

Published: 27 October 2025

Framing the challenge

Ofwat set out their assurance requirements for AMP8 – an assurance strategy and delivery plan which will need to be available to Ofwat, on request, early in AMP8.

The impact of these new and amended frameworks necessitates improvements to Northumbrian Water's existing internal and external reporting and assurance. The volume and detail of data required will overwhelm existing control systems, and elevated financial consequences of non-compliance (or programme change) significantly increases business risk. The implications are that companies will need to have a high-confidence, ‘right first time’ approach.

Northumbrian Water wanted to assess the readiness of their current arrangements and set out a high-level process and transformation plan for meeting the new regulatory needs.

Approach and implementation

We reviewed the Ofwat literature to identify the relevant reporting requirements for price control deliverables, large-gated schemes (including enhanced cost sharing and direct procurement for customers or Regulators' Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development (RAPID)-type schemes), and the water industry national environment programme (WINEP) decision monitoring framework.

We then presented these data requirements to the SMEs from Northumbrian Water and captured the current source and system for the data item, or identification of a gap in current data architecture or reporting processes.

We added a responsibility assignment matrix and timeline for each area, assigned a data maturity to each data item, and a recommended improvement action (if appropriate). The improvement actions were then grouped into themes and mapped to the assurance transformation plan.

Impact and outcomes

We produced a final report and transformation plan, identifying gaps within each change lens:

Data capture
Process and reporting
Assurance
People

This enabled Northumbrian Water to quickly scope the level of data and change activity required and learn the hard lessons early, to place projects in motion before reporting is required and get to a more mature position by the regulatory deadline, producing a significantly stronger final output.