About Consultation
From April 2017, 1.2 million businesses and other non-household customers of providers wholly or mainly in England will be able to choose their supplier of water and wastewater retail services.
The non-household (NHH) retail price controls were set from 1 April 2015 for a period of two years – taking account of representations from water companies that there would be advantages in reviewing these arrangements before the market opens in April 2017. In November 2015, we published an initial consultation on this review; this draft statement of method builds on our earlier consultation by setting out our current thinking on key issues and next steps, including:
- our views on the issues raised by respondents to our November consultation, such as whether our review should retain the relatively narrow focus envisaged when we set the existing controls in December 2014, or whether we should consider wider issues (such as the overall level of cost and margin allowances for the NHH retail price controls)
- a possible approach to simplifying the form of the NHH retail price controls
- our proposal for a three-year duration for the new NHH retail price controls
- a revised timetable for the review and more detail on information requirements and data tables
We summarised our wider programme of work on protecting customers in the new retail market in the information notice (IN 15/12) we published last September on the opening of the retail market.
Alongside this consultation we have published draft data tables pre-populated for each of the relevant water companies. These are in xlsm format.