Tony Wray, Chief Executive Severn Trent Plc, said:
"Our focus on continuous improvement has once again delivered a good financial and operational performance.
Severn Trent Water invested £555 million during the year, supporting growth of our RCV by 3.9% to £7,364 million and delivering operational improvements in the areas we targeted, with leakage at a 20 year low and 13 out of the 14 Ofwat key performance indicators (KPIs) showing an improved or stable performance year on year. We expect to invest around £600 million to £620 million this year to further improve our operational performance and service levels.
Customer satisfaction, as measured by the SIM (Service Incentive Mechanism), also continues to improve, and our combined average household water bill remains the lowest in England and Wales.
From a financial perspective, Severn Trent Water delivered further efficiency gains, with PBIT stable year on year, despite incurring additional infrastructure investment costs and costs related to the adoption of private drains and sewers (PDaS), which together totalled £25 million.
In our non-regulated business we delivered like for like revenue growth of 5% as expected, and we continued to invest in growth areas of the business.
For shareholders, we have delivered sustainable, progressive returns, with the full year dividend growing by 8.2%, in line with our policy of growth of RPI+3% until March 2015. In accordance with this policy the dividend for the current year, 2013/14, is set to be 80.40p, an increase of 6%.
For the remainder of AMP5 we will continue to execute on our capital programme of £2.6 billion and expect RCV to grow to £7,9971 million, representing growth of 24.6% over the AMP.
On the regulatory front, we are pleased to see that the framework for the next price review PR14 is aligned with much of our own thinking, and we look forward to submitting a high quality plan to Ofwat in December of this year."
