By: Will Hutton
December 15, 2018
When a regulator looks at you unblinkingly and says she wants the companies she regulates to understand they are part of a social contract, you catch your breath. Yes, replies Rachel Fletcher, chief executive of water regulator Ofwat, as I press her about the term “social contract”. The news is “out there” even if not “fully baked”, she says.
Fletcher speaks deliberately, choosing her words with care in a slight Scottish burr. Water is “essential to life – not just another commodity,” she says. “It does not chime with people that the relationship between them and their water supplier is transactional.”