Our role is to ensure customers can turn on the tap and get access to top-quality drinking water, day and night, as well as safely transporting, treating and returning it back to the environment once customers have used it.
This involves supplying more than a tonne of water a week to each of our 9 million drinking water customers and recycling waste from 14 million people safely back to the environment. That's 2,600 million litres of water and 2,800 million litres of sewage a day - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We offer our water retail services to eligible business customers across the UK.
Providing the essential service is a major responsibility that is already, and will continue to be, challenged by population growth, climate change and new legislation now and in the future. This means that now more than ever, we need to recruit and keep the best talent available to work with us on some pretty big projects that will help overcome these problems.
We plan to invest nearly £4.9bn across our region from 2010 to 2015. We've developed three major engineering schemes to help stop sewer overflows and improve water quality in the River Thames. This includes upgrades to all five of our major sewage treatment works in London, the construction of the Lee Tunnel and the Thames Tideway Tunnel.
Our long-term plans include measures to adapt to the inevitable effects of climate change and steps to reduce our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. We are taking a twin-track approach of managing the unavoidable impacts of climate change on our business 'adaptation', combined with a reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions 'mitigation'.
By managing our business responsibly we contribute to sustainable development. This means making sure that the way we do business today, meets the needs of our customers and other stakeholders, and will enable us to continue to do so far into the future.