Good morning, everyone, and welcome to what is a disused building in Coventry, but it's going to be the venue for today. As most of you know, we've spent the last three days literally here with all of our first-line managers, and it's been absolutely brilliant. It's my favorite time of the year when we get all of our leaders together, and what an amazing opportunity to not just get them together, but to talk about the future for the next seven years. It has been properly, properly exciting. Now, if you're going to take over a bit of a disused IKEA, you've got to go on brand, right? So during the course of today, we don't even get ourselves embarrassed, we're going to shamelessly plug some concepts around the brand.
So by the time you get to the end of the day, you'll be feeling a little bit less keen, possibly on IKEA. Now, in terms of why we wanted to be in this building, because it is a slightly strange location, one of the things that we're passionate about in Severn Trent is over the course of the next 10 years or 9 years left, actually, since we set the strategy, we want to try and change 100,000 people's lives in our region. There are 400,000 people that live in our region that are long-term unemployed. They don't have good job prospects, maybe they're currently in prison doing time, maybe their kids are of third-generation unemployed families.
For whatever reason, maybe they're in a job, but it's a very lowly paid job, and they've never had the opportunity to see that there is more to them and they can achieve more. So we set ourselves this bold societal ambition that between now and 2030, we're going to have 100,000 people out of poverty. We've only been at it a year, and it's going really well. I'm not going to give you a detailed update today. We'll save that for future events. But one of the reasons for being here is that this actually is going to transform into being part of the Coventry City Cultural Gateway, and we're going to take a permanent presence. It's one of our contributions back in our region to societal strategy.
Coventry has a very high level of deprivation, and we're going to create a permanent presence here that will have employability training right in the heart of the city. For some people that are really struggling, even having an Academy two miles out of the city is just psychologically or financially too far for them to get to. So to have a physical presence in Coventry makes total sense. This is our hometown, we're headquartered here. We love Coventry. You might not see the best of it on the journey from the station to here. There are more good bits to it, and we genuinely are passionate and proud to be able to help it.
Now, actually, in researching IKEA, though, you might not know, but this is the motto of the chap that actually created IKEA, and it's quite fascinating how similar this is, I think, to the PR24 process. You take many people, many, many hours of work, you work them all together, they take joy out of it, and in the end, you get happy souls through the course of working together. That, I promise you, is like PR24. It's like that in motion. So this document has felt just like that. There's never been a dark day in the lead up to our 2,500-page submission, and it's perfect timing because today we can unveil it.
We can talk to you about it in all its glory, we can bring it to life 3D, and we've got about 35 senior Severn Trents, that you can quiz and ask them anything they do and what they're up to as to their thoughts on it and why they're excited about the next seven years of Severn Trent. Now, it is our boldest PR24. I recognize many in the room have been around for more than one PR24, and it is our boldest. We are properly excited. It covers such a range of activities that customers have said they really, really want us to lean into.
It's a Price Review that's founded on the belief that actually, there's been a lot of public press about Severn Trent, about the sector, and we need to lean into that and make sure that this particular investment program really allows a transformational change on the sector's performance and actually addresses, you know, some of the big parallel activities that are, I guess, the context points. To bring the context to life, I thought I'd just talk through these 6 things. This is the context against which we've crafted the Price Review . We're very clear that the media attention is very, very different to, say, 5 years ago, when we had a similar capital markets day, unveiling the plan back in Leicestershire. It is tenfold, twentyfold, more focused in terms of media attention.
At the same time, that media attention, and whilst we are the good performer of the sector, I guess we'd say, and the regulators would back us up on that, nonetheless, you know, it has affected the whole sector's credibility. We need to work our socks off now to really create that sense, that trust back with every single customer about the future and about the fact that we've listened and we've heard exactly what they want us to do. We know that new tech is properly exciting, and we're going to embrace it as an organization. So today, we're not really going to cover actually AI in detail, I'm afraid, even at all, small little snippets. But actually, when today ends, tomorrow, I begin, I guess, the more exciting phase, you could argue, of my job for the next while. I begin the all people events.
So from tomorrow morning, I do 75 all people events across the company. I educate all 8,000 people in Severn Trent on what the future looks like for the next 18 months. And a massive chunk of those individual roadshows is on AI. It's about getting them to embrace this and understanding, you should see it as a copilot, as an extra person in your team. It's somebody else doing some of the jobs that maybe you didn't fancy doing. That's how we're rolling out and embracing AI, and we've got three brilliant examples we share with our colleagues that I know are going to get them as excited. So while we don't cover in as much detail today, actually, as an organization, we are very, very excited about the opportunities that new tech will bring us.
The fourth context point, then, is climate change, and it links to population growth. They're the two big dilemmas, certainly for our sector, the speed at which climate change is arriving, but also in our region, the speed the population growth is also arriving. Over the next 20 years, we grow quite dramatically as a region. Second highest growth rate, actually, after the Southeast, and we need to prepare for that. We need to get ahead of the curve. When we experienced 40-degree heat last year in Mansfield for, like, 7 days on the bounce, that's, like, unheard of territory in our region. And again, that kind of long, hot, dry summers and wet winters is a reality that every infrastructure organization will need to manage and to still deliver brilliant, brilliant assets and brilliant service. And last, but by no means least, is the economy.
We announced the PR24 with some pretty big numbers that says it's GBP 12.9 billion of investment. It is a bill that goes up by just over a third, by 36%. That actually sounds huge, doesn't it? That kind of sense, and we'll talk and lean into that today because you've got this cost of living situation. Yet, we've worked with tens of thousands of customers to ask their opinion of what's the perfect plan. We offered them lower plans with less investments, and yet they consistently kept coming back to, what we really want is maybe helped by the media attention over the last couple of years. What they really want is a plan that truly invests and leans into these activities, and people accept that comes with a bill increase, and our acceptability is incredible.
76% of customers wanted this version of the plan, which is higher than last PR19, when the bill was going down. And I think, as I said, that media attention has definitely assisted with customers wanting something different going forward... Now, one of the things that we did five years ago, year four of the AMP, is that we did some big bets. As a senior team, we sat down and said, "You know, if you just keep delivering what the regulators almost set you to do, you don't transform. You've got to sit down as a senior team and work out what are the things that we could do now that would set us apart?" And effectively, you're taking decisions that says you've only got so much money to invest. What are the things that you truly believe will be the game changers for your organization?
I thought what I'd do now is to share with you the five big bets we made last time around, with a bit of context, and then excitingly, I'm going to share with you the forward-looking big bets. It's something we didn't do last time around. We almost delivered and then told you about it. This time around, we're going to tell you in advance about the five big bets that we're making for the future and actually take you in on that journey. See what I've done here with the IKEA, IKEA photo frames? I'm really sticking with my theme, right? These are the five big bets that we made five years ago, year four of the last AMP. They're quite different in style, but all of them have had incredible impact.
They've changed Severn Trent in a different way, but all of them have been meaningful towards our performance. Starts with the Academy. Many of you would have heard us talk about the Academy, and at the same time as many, many companies were downsizing, reducing activities, not spending money on development, outsourcing, we were kind of going the other way. And we realized in order to have to our ambitions, in order to have the technical activities, the experience we wanted, to manage the skills shortage maybe across the UK, then you needed a dedicated home of learning. And we invested in it, and it's been absolutely brilliant. Just three statistics to bring it to life: The first is we've had 3,000 individual events since the day the Academy opened. Now, some of those training events have been kind of like just small.
They've been like a few hours' worth of educational training on leadership, maybe. Some of them have been like six weeks long, apprentice, deep dive educations on leakage, for example. So 3,000 different training events shows you how busy the Academy building has been, but also the amount of hours that our, effectively our colleagues have gone through in educational upskilling. That's definitely helped us be a more educated person. We're a very empowered organization. You've got a single person on the site at 2:00 A.M. that is reading very complicated data and dials and got to make decisions. Having a very, very technically competent organization is part of our success, we're convinced. It's also allowed us, though, to do more for the community. In the last year alone, we've done 113 hours of employability training.
I mentioned to you, we want to help 100,000 people get out of poverty. To do that, you've got to put real work in, and we've done 113 hours of different training. You can go along and be... You be-- we'll help you write your CV. You can pop along, and we'll do actually a fake interview. In fact, our interview performance is quite impressive. If you go along and have a fake interview with Severn Trent, if you're one of my customers in my region, you can put this on your opportunities for the future, then we have actually a high 80% chance you get the job if you go have a mock interview with a Severn Trent. So we are actually quite good, turns out, at mock interviews, but that whole sense.
We've also done loads and loads of teenagers coming out of COVID on confidence training. Lots of late teens didn't come out of COVID lockdowns the same as they went in. We've done a huge amount of work on, on skills like that, as well as more technical skills. So that's the first of the big bets that we think will... it's only just getting into a zone. It's going to be even more impressive with future insourcing. The second, then, is probably the most expensive. So this is the one we put most of our cash into, which was insourcing design, and it's been absolutely fabulous.
So we chose to say that rather than actually allowing all of our design to be done by supply chain, and we've got some of our lovely members of our supply chain who are with us today. Doesn't mean that we do all of it, but we do the vast majority of the design ourselves. And the reason that helps is it means that we've got people in our organization that know our assets better, that have better connections in the ops team. So when they're designing it, they're designing it with more knowledge, maybe not more knowledge of the supply chain, but more knowledge of our organization, what will work best for us.
But it also gives us the chance that when we get those multiple designs, if the budgets have changed, if inflation's gone up, as we've seen pretty wildly over the last couple of years, we can sit down and say, "I've earmarked GBP 15 million for that project. The favorite design you've given me is GBP 20 million. I don't want to put GBP 20 million into it. What's the GBP 15 million design look like? Let's tweak it slightly." That's completely brilliant. That works well. So it's given us more ownership of being able to manage what have been the very significant cost-based increases across consumables. We've been able to manage that better by having our own design team in-house. It also means we've got 300 people who have got extra technical skills. They can help, again, pass the technical skills on.
And again, it helps us with that, you know, inability to fight with everybody else with the same supply chain. We've been able to have real advantage by having those people in our organization, contributing to more debates than just the physical engineering design. The third team is what we call the Blue Response Team. It's called the Network Response Team, and basically, the NRT, you know, if you end up, you know, God forbid, but you do have a burst pipe, and you are going to have customers off supply, we don't worry about it. We send our tankers straight out, and they just get there straight away.
And what they'll do is they'll set up maybe an overlander, so a piece of pipe that goes from one hydrant to another, that avoids the area that has currently got the burst pipe and keeps all those customers on supply. And it's been fab for us. You know, the business case was based on supply interruptions. You'll remember that in AMP6, our supply interruptions performance wasn't good enough. We lost a lot of money on that ODI. By investing in this organization, in all of these tankers, it has been such a game changer for us.
The unintended consequence, though, which has been brilliant, is actually in downtime, these teams have been able to do more work on the network, calming the network, getting it better, but also more, more work on discoloration, which has meant quite a lot of awards on water quality complaints, something that wasn't actually in the original business case. There's been a really good opportunity by having this organization in-house to us. AMP4 was Green Power. Now, I guess since you're invested in the company, I should probably say we predicted it. We saw that energy was going to go up by tenfold, and that meant that we bought into Green Power.
Clearly, we didn't, but we did see that energy was our second highest cost, and on that basis, it made sense to think about the fact that actually Green Power is not a dissimilar skill set to buy resources. We're excellent to buy resources internally. Leah's here today, who runs it. You can, I guess, chat with her over breaks on what does she do to be so good at it. But we realized, actually, that skill set would work really well. Why didn't we buy food waste assets and actually begin to inject more gas into the grid, and it would help us with our carbon neutral commitment, and it's been really good. We've gone from 140 gigawatt hours a few years ago to 350 gigawatt hours, actually, just this year, just from Green Power, which is amazing.
We now self-generate about 60% of our energy needs, and consistently every year, we tick that up, and it's been a real success story for us. And last of the bets is one that maybe we haven't discussed as much, but internally, it's massively popular. It's the trunk mains team. Previously, we would have had to ring up the supply chain if we had a trunk mains burst or an issue on a site with a trunk mains activity and ask them to come along. They were highly unattractive jobs for the supply chain because they're not particularly big jobs, they're not big, big money-making jobs, and we need them now... and they're already busy and tied up, and quite rightly, they've got their resource schedules.
To have it in-house means that if we do have an issue, we've got people with that caliber and that skills totally available, but also, again, in downtime, they've been able to do so much proactive work on the biggest, largest pipes in our sector, in our organization. That means that actually, we've seen a 30% reduction in reactive workload as a result of their 17,000 proactive tasks. Again, something that has been above and beyond what we thought might have come out of that business case. So that brings to light some of the bets we made five years ago, and as I said, in a second or two, I'll unveil the new ones. Now, you've got to try and get yourself ready for Price Review by going into it in the strongest possible position. And I guess we enter with some good things.
We enter as the only four-star company in terms of environmental metrics. We enter as a leader on ODIs, and we're very focused on continuing that journey. We definitely enter scene, I think, as one of the people that Ofwat would say, actually, whether it's financial resilience or service performance, you know, actually, we were the sector leader on both for the first couple of years. We're a bit gutted to drop down to only middle of the pack this year with the rest of the gang. But as you can imagine, we're working flat out in year four to get ourselves back into that sector leader positional measures. I've never enjoyed middle of the pack.
They're not words that I love, so we're going to work our socks off to get ourselves back to being a sector leader on service, and as it stands today, we're in great shape on that. I thought I'd show you a video now. It's a video that we use internally with our people, so I did debate, should I show it on Ofwat, but actually, I think it brings to life a whole heap of things we've worked on in the last period of time, that actually Severn Trent is pretty proud of. There'll be a few stats in there that might actually be interesting to you, but I think also it brings the culture of Severn Trent across.
We're quite an informal, kind of like low-key culture, and I think you get a bit of a sense of that in terms of some of the humor that is built into it. So I'll let you watch this.
Severn Trent, a great place to work, a great place to grow, a great place to thrive. Nine out of ten colleagues would recommend Severn Trent as a company to work for, and that they're happier than those at Vodafone, Volkswagen, and HelloFresh. Severn Trent has never been one to rest on their laurels, and we've continued to be a fundamental provider for our region. Now to try and summarize why we're such a great company in under two minutes. We welcome 500 new Severn Trent into the company this year alone through insourcing, one in seven of which joined us through our new talent, apprentice, and graduate schemes. There are the 219 interns from our communities, not to mention the 314 kickstarters. Remember them?
3 in 4 of our colleagues took part in our ShareSave scheme, and 2 in 4 were promoted into bigger or broader roles in the last 5 years alone. We built our very own Academy and delivered an average of 100 hours of training per person. In the community, we smashed our target of 100,000 hours of employability training. We educated 300,000 school children on brilliant water behaviors and wastewater behaviors, too. On the outside, the things that annoy our customers are going down: leakage by 9.3%, pollutions by 33%, water quality complaints by 37%, and supply interruptions by 28%. There are things we're doing that make our customers happy. We're supporting 1 in 10 families with their bills, and we're investing in so much more. The environment is getting some love, too.
We've got Nature Positive , we've got River Positive . Because of that, we've got a Four-Star Rating from the EA for a fourth year in a row. We're reducing the harm we cause to rivers from 24% to 16% and reducing overflow spills, too. We even got ourselves our very own dedicated team of River Rangers. Because of this, we're working towards 2 designated bathing rivers. We're nurturing nearly 700,000 trees and going to be one of the 30% water and waste companies sticking to Net Zero by 2030.
Is that all?
No! Our carbon is down from 548 kilotons to 242 kilotons, and now we're building the Net Zero Hub.
The world's first ever carbon-neutral wastewater treatment site.
We've now got eyes and ears all over our network. We have 100% overflow monitoring, we have 30,000 acoustic loggers watching for leaks, and 25,000 monitors watching urban waste for blockages. We've been grass busting, we've been grease fighting, we've been Love Actually... ing. And finally, we donated GBP 8 million of our community fund to local charities. All this and so much more delivered by happy people.
Very good. Right, then, so you're now very educated on lots of stats and statistics, but let's talk about the plan. So, and you see what I've done again, I'm sticking with my IKEA theme, so there's going to be no Allen keys during the course of today. You won't have to make any Billy bookcases. But it's worth bringing to light just that size and scale of what the plan is. So as you know, GBP 13 billion, and we genuinely believe that because so much of it is either base spend or statutory spend, that we're in great shape, and we need to get going.
So having effectively had huge support from yourselves to the actuaries, having had huge support from customers in terms of their desire, having discussed the plan during the course of the summer, a lot with Ofwat and DEFRA and the Environment Agency, and being confident that actually the areas we're focused on are the right areas and are the areas that they want us to focus on in this exact time window. It feels that we just need to get going, and that's the whole message we've been saying to our people over the last three days, that actually we just need to start. The most important thing we can do for our customers is to deliver the benefits early, right now, and begin to get moving. Key dates for the process, just so you've got it in your mind.
So, we're in what I was called the pen pal phase. So I don't know how many of you remember, but when I was like S, and I'm older than quite a lot of people, when I was a child, we used to have, like, we used to be given pen pals. You know, I used to have this guy called Laurent in France, and every other week, I was made by my French teacher, Madame Collier, to write him a little note, and he'd write one back. It's not dissimilar with ourselves and Ofwat right now. So the plan went in on the second of October, and then from then on in, they write us notes. I mean, they're a little bit less cheerful, some of the notes, to be frank, than Laurent's were, and they're a little bit speedier.
Laurent was not a good writer, and Ofwat, it turns out, can be. So, and they will give us 48 hours to reply. Now, we will get a very good sense of what they think of our plan, how they feel about us, based on the queries. So we've not had any in yet. We've had one that's just asked for a 10-year link to a document. That doesn't count as a query, but they will begin to come, and that's the first big phase of the plan. That typically lasts, I guess, 2-3 months, and then the queries dry up, and then effectively, you're into moving towards announcement phase. So Ofwat have said, that they categorically will give Draft Determination in May-ish, but they look like they will also give early feedback as to their thoughts on the plans and companies sometime in March.
So that's what we're assuming, is they're the two key dates, is March, some kind of early feedback, May, draft determination, Final Determination, obviously, all the way through to the next December. Now, we know that, I guess, the very best WaSC plan will be judged to be outstanding. We'd love to be it. We've been open all along, that we'd love to be seen as the very best plan, but our job is to make sure as well, we have a plan that actually delivers everything our customers want. Beyond all else, that is the responsibility for the leadership team, is to create a plan that delivers everything customers have asked for, but also to do it in a brilliant fashion and to keep moving the sector forward. The sector's got a mixed set of results across the piece.
We want to be the leader that consistently pushes the sector forward, like we did with Get River Positive , like we've done with the CSO target. We want to make sure that we're moving on the big things and keeping things going. Now, in terms of how Ofwat will judge the plan, they've already been clear, haven't they? They've got three lenses they will judge the plan through. They're going to look at deliverability, they will look at affordability, and they will look at financeability. And on deliverability, there's a whole section today that's going to bring to life for you why we believe that our plan is probably more deliverable than any other.
So when you cross-compare, and you will have done this, I'm sure, you cross-compare the amount of capital run rate of every single company in the sector, there are only three companies that are running at the right rate of capital spend right now, two of which, obviously, Severn Trent and Hafren Dyfrdwy, and one company, I guess, in the east region. Effectively, you would have seen that other companies will have to do a massive step change to deliver deliverability. We've been working really hard to make sure that we seamlessly glide. In actual fact, we accelerate spend, so we give ourselves capacity at the tail end of the next AMP to accelerate AMP nine again.
We're confident not only to deliver in the 12.9, but we've created ourselves a few hundred million GBP worth of capacity in year five, next AMP, to be able to bring forward early start spend to glide seamlessly into the next AMP as well. That's our sense around deliverability, but Ofwat will certainly look through measures like current spend, supply chain mix, year variation, what you delivered before, have you delivered your updates this time around? All of those type of measures, and we'll share some ideas. We've got some new things to unveil to you today. James Jesic will take you through some few new exciting things in our deliverability slot later today. The second thing is affordability, and they will want to look at actually GBP affordability.
We're delighted, to be honest, with the fact that not only is our bill the second lowest bill now today, it ends the second lowest bill at the end of the next price review. We've now looked at every other plan, and we end second lowest in the land. So whilst you will see sometimes in the press that our percentage looks higher, it's 'cause we start at such brilliant, good value. So in terms of actual pound notes, which is the way Ofwat will look at it, we do end second lowest in the land at the end. They will also want to look at how much disposable income is moving. It's broadly static. You're going from 1.2% median income in the Midlands to 1.3% median income in the Midlands over that seven-year period.
So again, almost static in that sense. Then there's a big debate about that some people cannot afford that. Even going up by not too much, nonetheless, people can't afford it, and we get that. We don't want anybody in our region to ever fear our bill. We announced only 18 months ago that we didn't want water poverty in our region, and we were committed to resolving it, and we said that by 2025, we'd be ahead of the curve for any customers that we can see now. That's true, and we will continue to do that. So we're making available up to double the numbers, so 1 in 7 families can be supported by the time we get through to 2030. That's 700,000 customers. It's a GBP 550 million package. Again, we've now read all the plans.
It's the best plan in the sector from an affordability perspective. There is more support for more customers. And the last section then is around financeability. And clearly, you guys have played a massive, massive, massive part in that financeability. You might have been in the room today as somebody that we raised debt with, so thank you for that. So you might be somebody in the room who actually recently contributed to our equity raise, which we are hugely, hugely grateful for that support. And so to bring it to life, I've been asking Helen over the last couple of days to share with our people what it means, right? What is an equity raise? What does it mean? And she's not going to do that with yourself, because I think you understand that.
She is just going to bring to life why this is so important and why we genuinely think being in our own swim lane on financeability and having read all the plans, we are the only company to actually have the money available today. There are a couple of others that are privately owned that say that they have got the support from their shareholder base, and they're confident they could, if the whack was to be good enough. We are the only people here today, fully funded. With that, I'll hand to Helen.
Thank you, Liv. Morning, everyone. Great to see you all today. For those I haven't met, I'm Helen Miles, I'm the CFO here at Severn Trent. So I'm gonna cover three things. I'm gonna cover three things today. I'm gonna talk about the funding and our thinking behind the equity raise and how we think about that. I want to talk about finance, finance performance and financing generally. And thirdly, I do want to touch on how we're thinking about growth, and how that relates to earnings. So to start on funding, I guess, as a company, we've always been focused on the long-term financial resilience of our company. And we know, as Liv said, that Ofwat will be looking at our plans to see are they financeable, and it's one of the three key tests that they will do.
AMP 8 is an unprecedented opportunity to invest in the things that our customers want, that we can invest in for the environment, and obviously, things for our shareholders as well, and we didn't wanna miss that opportunity. We recognized there was a role for equity to play, and we were delighted with the response we got and the support we got for that equity raise that allows us to make that investment and bring our ambitious plan to reality. Now, it does raise a couple of questions, which you may have, which I will cover now. Why did we do it now? Why did we do it now? Why didn't we wait for the draft determination or the final determination? Why did we go so early? Well, there's a couple of really good reasons for that.
Number one, we wanted to submit our best plan. We wanted to submit a plan that covered deliverability, covered affordability, but also was really clearly financeable, and that's, that's why we went early. We also, because of the significance of the TotEx uplift, we wanted to get going now. We don't want to wait till the end of AMP8 to deliver some of the benefits for our customers and the environment. We want to get going now, and we've accelerated. Over the next 18 months, we'll accelerate GBP 400 million, and we've been as Liv said, we've been telling the teams for the last couple of days, "Get on with it, get starting." We've got loads of people this minute working on AMP8 back at the ranch.
I guess the second question is, you know, we haven't had our Draft Determination or Final Determination, why are you so confident that you're going to get this plan approved? Well, there's a couple of really good reasons for that as well. Number one, 93% of the investment that we're going to make is either Base Costs, around GBP 8 million of it is Base Costs and enhancements, and the enhancements is mainly statutory. So it's things that we've got to do. So yeah, there might be some debate around the edges, around the costs, but we've got to do it. And on the Base Costs, we're really confident that we've got an efficient cost base, so we've analyzed the models. Shane and his team have been doing the things they love to do, analyzing the models and making sure that we've got efficient costs.
And, and lastly, but very importantly, we've our statutory spend, we know it's been signed off by the regulators. It's impacted by a number of regulators, and we know they've signed it off, so we want to get on with it. We want to start and get on with it. As we go through today, you're going to hear loads of stuff about how we're spending this money, and, but the thing that I love about this plan is that it's broad. It's not in one specific area. It's not in one specific area of the business. It's broad, and it's across the business. So you'll see that later on. So moving on to financing our performance. So I know James Bowling is in the audience.
I don't want to overpraise him, but for the last 7 years, we have outperformed our financing allowance, and we're really confident we can do that in AMP8. The embedded debt allowance that's set by Ofwat is going to be based on the averages of all the companies. We're one of the third, one of the lowest in the sector, the third lowest, so we're confident that we can beat that, part of the plan. And in the same way as for 7 new debt raises is indexed to the iBoxx, and we've been really successful so far this AMP, raising money that beats the iBoxx through around 18 basis points. And we're really confident we can raise at competitive rates because we've got strong credit ratings, we've got great liquidity, and that means we can be really flexible about when we go into the markets.
We don't have to go at certain times. So if something's happening in the market, we can not go or go, depending on which way around it is. And we've got a little and often strategy, and we'll go far and wide to get our financing and make those opportunistic deals as they come up. And of course, you'll know that we've got really strong ESG ratings, and the plan that we're talking about will only enhance that. So moving on, I do want to touch on growth, efficiency, and earnings. And the reason for that is, as you know from our plan, which I'm sure you've all read in detail, is, we're going to deliver with this plan 31% real RCV growth. That's real RCV growth.
We're in this fantastic position that we're quite certain about, that we're quite certain that if we get the plan signed off, we'll deliver that growth. That's a really unusual position to be in, to deliver that level of growth with quite a lot of certainty. But what you're going to see from me is that when we deliver that growth, we're going to do it in a responsible way, and we're going to do it efficiently. It's very easy in companies that are growing quickly for costs to not be managed efficiently. What you're going to see from me is a real focus on making sure that we do deliver efficiently, and we keep our focus on hitting you know building on the great base that we've got to continue to do things really efficiently.
And when you go around today, you're going to see that we're investing in people, we're investing in technology, some really exciting technology. We're investing in systems and processes. All of those things are going to make us more efficient. They're going to make us better, and they're going to make us more efficient. And if you combine that with really good old-fashioned cost control, it's a really potent combination to make sure that we grow in a controlled and managed way. 'Cause what I want to do is I want to make sure that the RCV growth that we're delivering does translate into earnings. Because, yes, RCV growth in itself is brilliant.
We get to make the investment for our customers, the environment, but we've got to make sure that at the same time, that flows through to earnings, and that's one of the things that we're, we're... that I will be focused on. We mustn't forget, I know we're talking about the regulated business, primarily today, but we mustn't forget the non-regulated business, which is going from strength to strength, and it's a complementary, complementary business to our core business. You'll have seen, we've completed the Andigestion acquisition back in September, and those are the types of things, the opportunities that we want to take as we go forward. Just to summarize, we're in this wonderful position, thanks to the support from our shareholders, that our AMP8 plan, as we stand here today, 18 months to go, is fully funded.
Great position to be in. We know, we're confident that based on the way the model works, and based on the way our approach to financing, that we can deliver outperformance. And we're really focused on making sure that we grow efficiently, and that we can turn that growth into earnings growth as well. And with that, I'll hand back to Liv.
Very good. So now I get to unveil for you what are the big investments. Now, when we've been doing this with our people in the last few days, it's been like bonfire night. I've been saying we're going to invest in X, and they've been going, "Ooh!" Now, I'm not going to get you to do it, 'cause I can sense the audience would not be relishing the opportunity to join in, but it has been wonderful. It's been, like, electric in here the last few days. So it starts with concept one, which is a fast start. We invest over GBP 400 million over the next 18 months to get ourselves in a brilliant shape, and of course, we're going to invest in areas that make sense for us to invest in. So we're gonna be making sure that we focus on active, you know, spills.
Zero spills, obviously, a big one. We're gonna spend more money on activities that are customer service-oriented, but we're also gonna make sure that we spend real cash investing in areas where we've got early regulatory dates. So that as we go into the next Price Review, we know that the four-star status changes, for example, three new measures come into it. We love our four-star status. We're gonna make sure that we continue to have that by getting ahead of the curve on anything that could be in that space as well. So what are the five big bets that we've decided to spend money on? So, so these are aimed at transforming us, but also getting us into the best possible shape for the long-term future, and they're hugely empowering for our people, and they've been so popular over the last few days.
I genuinely believe they will create contingency for us because of the efficiencies that come out of it, but I also think they'll create us a very, very strong operational performance. That means as we go into the next AMP, we'll be the clear sector leader. So big bet number 1 is around insourcing. So we are the most in-sourced organization in our sector, actually, and we genuinely believe it's one of the reasons that we perform well on lots of the measures, and we're gonna go further and faster. We're gonna do an extra 1,000 jobs this year.
We actually did 500 jobs just a few weeks ago, so it's 500 to go, and this is around us taking back control of things where we know that we're gonna do it forever, and we know that actually, having permanent Severn Trent resource would give us just a different oomph. So the most recent activity we took back in was waste networks. So the guys and girls that go out, that do jetting, that go to customers' houses, that manage blockages, but also that need to know the network and work out, actually, there's something weird going on in this particular location. There must be something we can do, maybe education, or maybe we should realign the network, but I want that learning coming back in.
I don't want it with a highly attrition-oriented contract base where I'm paying day rate for somebody who's just doing a job and going home and not worrying about the network. I want the love that comes with a dedicated field force that knows they own that particular part of the network. So that's one, is our first big bet, is insourcing. And actually, if you can imagine announcing to our organization that you're gonna insource more, that's more opportunities, that's more promotions, it's a really, really engaging thing for all of our leaders over the last few days. The second big bet is around what's called plug and play. And it's hard to bring this to life, to be honest, in words. So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna bring it to life in detail with some videos and with some colleagues showing it.
The way I want you to imagine is we've got to deliver GBP 12.9 billion. As part of that investment program, we want to try and work out some activity types. How do we do it cheaper, quicker, more efficient? There's about GBP 750 million that we think we can deliver through a totally different supply chain that they haven't used before. It's an automotive capability, it's factory led. So think for tanks, for dosing rigs, for CSO screens, for example. How do you end up creating them literally on a factory run, so they're kind of, like, created straight off, and then they go straight into situ? We reckon it'll probably save us a third of the time, quite considerable costs, and that'll be really helpful to get going, but actually also accesses a new supply chain.
We've got so much work for our current supply chain, even with all of our new partners, that taking out a chunk like this, of kind of like very steady work, that isn't their most exciting work, is brilliant to put it into a plug-and-play situation. You'll see it brought more to life in one of the breakouts. The third big announcement then, I guess, as we've seen over the last few days, is you'll have seen today in RNS, that we've signed a deal with Octopus to use their system, Kraken. And for us to get to be the very best in the organization, as we want to be on C-MeX, we know that we need to invest. Our billing system isn't good enough, our CRM capability isn't right, but even more importantly, we know that one of the big ODIs for the future is PCC.
We know that leakage is essentially linked to it. We know smart metering, we're doing 1 million smart meters, as our plan says. You need to be able to read that, to communicate that and manage it with customers. You need a CRM system to do that, and that's why we're investing in Kraken. We think it will genuinely transform the relationship we have with customers over the next few years. We are properly excited, and actually, we've got one of the senior team in the room today from Octopus, from Kraken, so again, good opportunity to talk to them and quiz them during the course of a break. So, it's a good chance to do that as well. The fourth then, kind of big bet that we're making, is around a dedicated ODI center of excellence.
The point on this is, I want the ops teams, and they're all in the room today, to own their ODIs. There's no escape on that basis, and I want us to continue to be brilliant on ODIs, no escape on that basis. But actually, there is more data, there is more AI becoming available, more things you can mine, and so we're gonna put Shane, now he's got the Price Review done, he's got practically nothing to do. So we're gonna get Shane to actually host, as well as his other remit, he's gonna lead this new dedicated ODI center of excellence, and we're talking about a small, perfectly formed group of people, seven, eight, nine, ten people. The leader's already identified, joining soon, and we know this is gonna be great for us.
We're talking about literally a handful of super bright, capable people, trawling through data to give insight back to the operational teams to go even further and faster on ODI outperformance. And remember, we've now seen what everyone else has chosen to put in their plan in terms of ODI targets, and our start point is strong. We're in a very, very good position on a whole range of the metrics. And last, but by no means least, is we know that the single biggest debate point in the sector from an ESG perspective, from a press debate, but actually from a customer debate, is the whole conversation around spills. And so we went bold in the plan. We've gone for an average of 14 spills, which is frontier, leader versus everybody else.
In actual fact, there are some companies that don't get to our 2030 target till 2050. So it gives you a sense of the sheer range in the sector of how bold and ambitious people are being on this. We've heard it. We know our customers want us to go faster. So the best way to do that is to embrace who is the best in the world, and actually, one of our partners that we've been working with, the Danish company, Aarsleff, they are brilliant in this space. So we've kind of realized and learned that we should set ourselves, for our people to understand it, we need to set ourselves a dedicated center of let's go towards psychologically Zero Spills Hub By calling it that, by actually engaging our people on the fact that's our long-term ambition, it will give different creativity.
Rather than just trying to grind out a small improvement every year, they'll look for those new, new innovative things. And it's one of the areas we're going to spend about GBP 70 million-GBP 100 million on over the next 2-3 years, is directly into this innovative area. We're very, very confident we can find ideas and solutions that will bring down the whole sector's costs on CSOs. We don't believe the current estimates are being discussed. We think it can be done for less, and we're going to evidence that over the course of the next few years. Now, you might be thinking, what am I doing today? Am I locked in this room for the next 6 hours? And I'm pleased to share that you're not right. So, Oh, I obviously didn't click on enough. Okay, there we go.
Oh, I've managed to break my own solution. There we go. Well, I know what it is anyway, so the good news is I don't need it. So, what we're going to do now is break you into groups, and you're going to go through four zones over the next little period of time. And just to get your context as to what you're going to be doing, one zone is going to be all around ODIs. There we go, all around ODIs, and we're going to share with you what's changed, what it looks like, and what we're going to do to make sure we're still ODI winners. We love being the best at ODIs. We're not going to give that mantle up just because there are a whole load of new metrics and a new format.
We stand ready to go to once again be a success story. The second of the slots you'll see is you'll go into, okay, what are we spending the GBP 12.9 billion on? And that's important for our people to see that. So it's all about the UMEs, the unmodeled expenditure, the enhancement expenditure. And actually, in that slot, you get the chance to understand the types of individual projects, which I think is fascinating. It brings to life the scale of how many things you'll be working on. And again, I think that'd be really super helpful to see the scale of environmental improvements. You'll then, obviously, we'll understand at some stage, how are you going to deliver this?
So make sure that we then take you through the deliverability, all of the activities we've got in that space, which again, I think will probably, hopefully, really give you real confidence in our ability to hit the ground running and deliver the GBP 12.9 billion. And last, but no means least, you'll enter into a zone which is around customers. You'll talk about the bill, the affordability package, and also what we're doing on some of the metrics that customers want to know more about. So actually, when customers talk to us, they want to see real progress. People don't mind the bill going up as long as you get more for it. People get frustrated that when the energy bill goes up, you turn on the light, and it's the same light.
They get frustrated that they have to pay more for their can of beans, with the same number of cans of beans. Actually, all of our interaction with customers has been, if I'm getting more for actually what you're giving me, rather than just the same quality water, the same activities, I actually buy into that. The press has educated me, I need to make investments. I'm into that as a concept. Now, we're going to divide you into two groups. That's why you've got your wristbands. You're going to do two groups before lunch, two groups after lunch, and you'll be mingling along the way. That's the plan. So with that, I need to find out which group stays here. Oh, you're both going. No one stays here. Good, let's all move. So I guess you'll need to go out there. You'll see the little... The colleagues with flags.
So if you're with a pink wristband, follow the person, obviously, with the pink wristband, and vice versa if you're with the other color. But that's the idea. So stand up and weave our way out this way and follow the flag. Oh, no, purple's that way. I take it back. Purple is that way. Pink is this way. There we go. Is that blue? Oh, blue.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our Everyday ODI Central session. I'm Steph Cawley, Customer Operations Director, and I'm delighted to be able to share with you some more details about the ODI world in AMP8, following our submission of our business plan. I'm going to talk to you a bit about what's changing and our new measures, as well as the work we're already doing to get ahead of the curve, because as you'd expect, we fully intend to continue to be sector leaders in ODIs in AMP8. As many of you know, the ODI landscape is changing, with Ofwat reinforcing the incentivization model with more common ODIs, nearly all of which have higher rates than AMP7, meaning they're worth more, providing great potential for outperformance.
Here at Severn Trent, we're determined to keep on leading the way, as that is how we will benefit our customers. After all, ODIs are designed with customers to make sure our efforts align with things that matter most to them, like delivering a brilliant service and taking care of the environment. We've always been brilliant at ODIs. In fact, we've already earned more in the first 3 years of AMP7 than we did in the whole of AMP6. We're confident we know what it takes to deliver the performance our customers, and we, expect. That isn't anything to do with luck. All Severn Trenters are fully behind these important measures, and we have a systematic approach across the business to drive better performance.
We've shown time and time again, no matter what the measure is, we come together to find a way to deliver and set the benchmark for the sector. If we take blockages for example, back in 2019, when we submitted our last business plan, we knew this was an area in which we needed to improve service. So we shadow reported the measure before the new AMP, invested in data early, and focused on operational excellence. And that means this AMP, we will have reduced blockages by an astonishing 40% and earned tens of millions GBP in reward in the process. But as always, just when you get used to the store, management decide to change the layout. This time, Ofwat are moving away from bespoke ODIs and towards common ODIs.
That means a lot more measures will be compared like for like with other water companies, although there will still be others where we have our own targets based on company performance. Let's just take a second to understand what those measures are. In AMP 8, you'll see there's even more at stake on ODIs than ever before, but at the same time, the target's reset to become comparative, which is why we've been pushing so hard on key measures to get upper quartile across the board. We've also got a good number of familiar topics with different ODI metrics thrown into the mix. Ofwat have taken our bespoke biodiversity ODI for AMP 7 and introduced it as a common ODI for AMP 8.
The definition has changed, which means we'll have to think differently about how we approach it, but have a great head start in terms of expertise when it comes to delivering scale Biodiversity projects. We've also got Greenhouse Gases added to the selection, as Ofwat embeds the expectation that all companies set a plan, like our Triple Pledge, to reduce operational greenhouse gas emissions. This is brand new as an ODI, but we've been measuring it for a long time, and the work we've been doing on our Net Zero journey will really help us push forward on this one. Then we've got measures such as Business Demand, which is new to us all. We'll need to be able to demonstrate that we've explored opportunities to influence businesses to generate water efficiencies. So what does all that mean?
Well, the good news is, based on the business plan submissions, on the majority of ODIs, we're upper quartile and driving frontier performance with our targets. For example, on CSOs, we've been targeting to be better by 2028 than some companies are going to be by 2050. The other bit of good news for us is that some measures, such as leakage, PCC, water quality complaints, sewer floodings, and pollution incidents, are now completely uncapped, meaning penalties and rewards are limitless. That means on measures like water quality complaints, where we've already hit our reward cap, this AMP will be able to keep earning. And then we've also applied for three bespoke ODIs, ODIs that are specific to us. One of these is on Frontier Catchments, getting farmers to reduce the amount of nitrates and pesticides they use, so it's easier to treat water.
There's also Capital Carbon, which looks at reducing the amount of carbon in all the construction work that will be needed as part of a much larger capital program. And finally, there's reducing disruption from our work, effectively reducing the nuisance caused to customers from us working on roads. So that's a quick overview of some of the ODIs we'll be judged on in AMP Eight and what we need to do to continue our sector-leading performance. We're going to need to carry over some elements of what made us great on them right now, as well as adopt some new approaches to target some of the new measures. And we've already started towards this.
As well as shadow reporting, we're already trialing some exciting water demand innovation by investing GBP hundreds of millions in CSOs this AMP, setting up a new ODI Center of Excellence, and are about to launch the County Cup, a brilliant new company-wide competition aimed at delivering a great customer experience to all of our customers. Just to give you a bit of a sneak preview of what we've got in store, take per capita consumption, where we're hoping to go big on installing flow valves. In simple terms, if every house on a street had one fitted, it would regulate the flow, so they all receive the same volume of water, regardless of the pressure. On the left, the tap is without a flow valve fitted, and on the right, we have one with the valve fitted.
As we turn up the pressure in one of the households, look at the difference in consumption per minute. Now, imagine every household connection delivering the same amount of water. Customers will save water, money, and reduce energy consumption without a noticeable change in supply. And for us, it means we'll have a more stable network, which we can optimize, make better predictions, conserve water, and reduce energy and costs. I call that a win-win. And on storm overflows, we're going to be working to improve 10 of them a week, every week for the whole of AMP Eight, because we know this is one of the areas where our customers really want us to drive forward performance.
So while we set ourselves a target of 14, lower than anyone else in the sector, we're going to be pushing hard to beat our target, and our brand-new Zero Spills Hub will play a big role in that. We'll be taking our learnings from our brilliant Net Zero Hub and dedicating resources to figuring out the most innovative, effective solutions that will enable us to understand what needs to be possible to live in a world of zero spills... And it's not just the ops team coming up with the goods. We've got something truly exciting heading our way, too. To help us with some of these big, bold targets, we're going to support ops with a small but mighty new ODI Center of Excellence. This team will look at things like AI, best practice, and innovation to help us find new and improved opportunities across key ODIs.
This is about entering a new level of performance, making those small, incremental gains, and spotting those potential opportunities through new and different lenses to ensure we keep on winning our ODIs, delivering fantastic benefits for our customers, and earning those rewards we all love. Of course, let's not forget this builds on an already brilliant foundation of comms sales, bonus measures, skills training, apprenticeships, and a whole host of other great things that we can push forward from. And finally, Liv will soon be setting off on an epic roadshow to talk to every one of our Severn Trenters, of, and as part of that, she'll be setting out her expectations for the future. So that's it. I hope you've learned about the ODI landscape in AMP8, what's the same and what's different.
But mainly, I hope you're as excited and energized as I am about the opportunities we're going to have to continue our brilliant track record into the next five years.
Hello, I'm Neil Morrison, HR Director at Severn Trent, and I'm delighted to be able to take you through our PR24 plan from a customer perspective. Our plans for AMP8 include a huge program of investment, which will deliver brilliant outcomes for our customers and the environment. But with that comes a higher bill, and so it's incredibly important for our customers and our regulators that our bills are fair and good value for money, we're able to offer support to absolutely anyone who's struggling to pay, and our customers support the investment we're making and the bill that comes with that. Our bills will be going up by an average of GBP 0.27 per day over the course of AMP8, from GBP 1.15 in 2025 to GBP 1.42 in 2030.
That sounds like a lot, but it means water bills will account for 1.3% of disposable income in 2030, compared to 1.2% today. We expect to remain the second lowest water bill in the land in that time. Now, in some senses, bills and prices have gone up everywhere. A pint of milk has gone up from GBP 0.30 in 1990 to GBP 1.05 in 2023, an increase of 250%. A loaf of bread that would have cost you GBP 0.25 in 1990 will cost you GBP 2.60 today, an increase of 940%. While most of the time that means getting less value, the same product for more money, the product our customers will be getting in 2030 will be hugely enhanced.
Every single penny of our enhancement spend is going to be spent on meeting new, higher standards or on things our customers have told us they'd like to see. All of that being said, it absolutely doesn't change the fact that some of our customers will really feel that increase, and making our bills affordable for everyone is an absolute priority for us. It's also a priority for Ofwat, who will be looking to companies to make sure that plans include a really comprehensive package of support for customers.
We've had to renew our mortgage, so obviously that's gone up quite considerably. And obviously, that takes money out of the chunks of things that we would predominantly use for, you know, luxuries, days out, meals, you know, things to do with children.
Everyone's switching shops to try and save money, looking for bargains, using food banks. It does keep me awake at night.
With the cost of everything else going up, it's just not great that the utility bills are also going up. It makes you want to prepare, and it makes you wanna not put the heating on just in house and not watch too much TV and not do too many wash loads. It does affect you both physically and mentally. By 2030, we will double the support we offer, helping 693,000 households with support measures, including bill discounts, debt payment matching, and payment breaks. That's one in seven families in the region and enough to support every customer in water poverty in our region by 2030. Our support doesn't stop at water bills. We'll provide debt advice to 50,000 customers per year.
We'll continue to refer 3,000 customers per year to income maximization advice and even fund essential household appliances such as fridge, freezers, cookers, or beds for those in severe financial hardship. We promise to go even further. We want to help our customers avoid being in water poverty at all, which is why, over the next 10 years, we'll support 100,000 people into work through a whole range of activities, including 10,000 hours of free employability training each year and 500 work experience placements for schools from socially deprived areas each year. Having reviewed all the price review submissions, we can see that this is the largest affordability support package available from any water company in AMP8, and our customers recognize that.
We listened to over 68,000 of our customers and a wide range of stakeholders and interested groups as part of our planning process. When we put our plan in front of them, 76% of our customers found it to be acceptable. That's because we're spending GBP 13 billion on the improvements that our customers feel most energized about. We know what our customers' priorities are because they told us, and I wanted to cover now just five of the big focus areas for them and how our plan addresses their needs. First up is leakage. One thing our customers do not like is to see leaks in the network, especially if, at the same time, we're asking them to save water.
So we've committed to reducing leakage by a further 16%, and a big part of that will be rolling out 1 million smart meters, which help us and our customers spot leaks much quicker by giving us regular data and the ability to raise the alarm if something doesn't look quite right. In Coventry and Warwickshire, we've already rolled out over 96,000 smart meters through the Green Recovery Program. And as a result, we've reduced the time it takes to identify and fix a leak on a customer's supply from 134 days with a traditional meter to 32 days with a smart meter. We're also looking at incentivizing through tariff reduction for those who help most in managing their consumption of water. And really excitingly, a brand new CRM system, which I'll touch on in a second.
It will be a huge enabler to allow us to do far more with our data than we can today. The next big priority for our customers is community flooding. This is a hot issue for our customers and getting more and more common with the impact of climate change on rainfall patterns. Now, we don't own the rain, and we're not responsible for community flooding, but we want to and need to do as much as we can to stop and help our customers as they're struggling to protect their home from climate change. You'll remember our fantastic project in Mansfield, which is using thousands of green and blue solutions to divert water away from sewers, slowing it down, storing it, and filtering it, which helps our drains to cope.
Well, we've proposed 4 more Mansfields in AMP8 to protect nearly 1,000 homes and buildings from internal floodings and remove almost 160,000 cubic meters of rainfall from the network. We're conscious that these plans don't help all customers who might have risks or issues. So as well, following on from the success of our River Rangers, we're also investing in a new team of community flooding liaison officers, who can help work with local communities to model how residents can use green solutions they invest in themselves to protect their homes. Third on our customers' priority list is Net Zero. 71% of our customers told us this was something they cared deeply about.
So we're planning to invest GBP 430 million to cut annual emissions by 240,000 tons of CO2 every year, taking our learnings from our pioneering world first project at Strongford Net Zero Hub. We also remain on track for a fleet of 100% electric or alternative fuel vehicles, with 25% of our fleet electric by the end of this year. And we'll have 100% of our energy from renewable sources by 2030. And even now, a whopping 80% of the energy we use is renewable or renewable-backed from our suppliers. We'll be working with our supply chains throughout AMP8 to understand how construction activities can reduce their emission impact. And we'll also be decarbonizing our use of heat so that buildings will move from burning fossil gas to being heated with heat pumps or alternative fuels.
So number 4, and it's a big one, pollutions. In our five-year plan, we're aiming for a 30% reduction in pollutions, pushing for industry-leading performance as part of our drive towards zero pollution incidents in the long term. We're going to see an even greater investment in our analytical capability, which will transform our end-to-end view of the waste network. This will help us understand the network better and take the right actions much quicker. In fact, we think we will see a staggering 150% increase in data about our waste assets, which is an immense opportunity. But to tap into this, we need brilliant analytics and an awesome team of people using it.
This is what we are doing, creating a bigger wastewater 24/7 network control with cutting-edge data capabilities, using machine learning to detect emerging issues so we can stop pollution from happening. Finally, on our list of customer priorities, we're going to transform customer service. We've got loads of work going on to improve customer service across every part of the business, but the real game changer at AMP8 will be our brand-new customer relationship management system, bringing the world-leading, state-of-the-art Kraken system to Severn Trent, to replace our existing customer management, billing, and metering platforms, which frankly just don't have the level of agility we need in today's evolving environment. We believe this will transform the customer and the colleague experience, with the system using AI technology to act as a teammate to the contact agents.
Our customers get a totally revolutionized service, with other utilities who've implemented Kraken seeing a massively positive impact on their customer service scores. It provides us with a huge amount of data analytics, which will be so valuable for us in water resource management. Just to wrap up what we've talked about, our bills are going up, but they still represent good value for money for our customers, and we've worked hard to keep them fair. We know any increase is too much for some of our customers, so we've proposed what we think is the most extensive affordability package in the sector. For that higher bill, customers are going to get a huge amount of investment in the areas that matter most to them.
And so all of that is reflected in the 76% of customers who judged our plan to be acceptable, which is important for us, important for our customers, and important for Ofwat too. Thank you for listening.
Hi, I'm Shane Anderson, Director of Strategy and Regulation at Severn Trent, and I'm here to tell you all about UMEs. You know, when you walk through IKEA and look at all the finished rooms, so all the furniture is already made and everything looks lovely? That's what I'm here to do, to talk about what the future looks like. No Allen keys for me, no instructions. I'm selling the dream. So what are UMEs anyway? Well, UMEs, or Unmodeled Expenditure, are special cases we've put forward to Ofwat that are over and above the amount we spend to run the business day to day. These cases might be made for a whole variety of reasons, but in AMP8, the really big reason is to meet new legislation. There's loads of it, covering everything from water resources, to river health, to site security, to dam integrity, and everything in between.
That means the enhancement cases are bigger than ever. Last AMP, we came to IKEA for the equivalent of a three-seater sofa. This time around, think of it more like a seven-seater sofa and a new lamp. Last AMP, we had three cases that went to Ofwat and received GBP 1.2 billion. A lot of money, but nothing compared to our AMP8 enhancement cases. We've put in 11 really great business cases worth a total of GBP 5 billion. That's the future we're selling: more water, better quality water, more resilience, safer homes... net zero treatment works, and cleaner rivers. Let's talk about what that all really means, starting off with our environmental program. Last time round, our program was GBP 675 million. This time, it's GBP 3.1 billion. It's a massive job we're talking about.
Thousands of changes we have to make to our operations in just five years, investing as efficiently as possible to get maximum bang for our buck, ranging from the relatively small, like fitting monitors, to the massive, like rebuilding some of our treatment works. It's a huge opportunity for us to create healthier rivers, and we'll be doing huge amounts of work all around our patch to drive a really significant impact. Using this investment, we will remove 164 tons of phosphate each year across 124 wastewater sites, cleaning up 1,370 km of our region's rivers in the process, which is about the same length as the Rhine. We'll use it to fit 1,000 river quality monitors and a further 280 flow monitors near our CSOs.
We'll use it to upgrade CSOs in AMP8, helping to clean up 1,868 km of rivers. It's going to be absolutely huge. But as well as WINEP, we're also improving our water resources. We're going to be putting hundreds of millions GBP into reducing demand, which we estimate will secure ourselves another 110 million liters of water a day, which is roughly 5% of the amount of water we put into our system each day. But we're also going to be spending a big time on the supply side. We've got plans for creating another 95 million liters a day in the most efficient way possible from existing sources. Let's take a look at some of the detailed schemes to get a real flavor.
We're building a link from Carsington to Tittesworth, across Derbyshire and into North Staffordshire, and another one across North Notts, getting the far north end of our patch the water they need. We're looking to expand Shelton in Shropshire, Little Eaton in Derbyshire, Draycote in Warwickshire, and Strensham in Worcestershire. We've chosen those sites because they'll allow us to get water to where it's most needed. That's also the reason behind the dam raise, which is also at Draycote, which gets us another 9 million liters a day of water for just under GBP 3 million. We need more water in Warwickshire, and that's a great way to do it. All of that in 5 years. That's not all. We want to make sure our customers continue to have water whenever they need it.
So we'll be building 6 new pipelines, allowing us to move water around our network to a greater degree than ever before. With a couple of projects in Warwickshire, a Derbyshire to Nottinghamshire link, one across the West Midlands from Oldbury to Meriden, and another one just south of here in Coventry, and then the outlier, the one that's going to go across rural Shropshire. That's almost 60 kilometers of new pipeline to make sure our customers don't have to worry about water shortages, even in the hottest of summers. On water quality, we're aiming to improve about 340 million liters of supplies, making us increasingly resilient against extremes of weather, regardless of the effects of climate change.
On top of all the work across water and waste, we've got an incredibly exciting scheme in AMP7 to turn Strongford into the world's first Net Zero sewage treatment works. This AMP, we want to apply those learnings to around 36 works to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and apply monitoring on a whole host of other sites. And on top of that, we're taking all the fantastic work we're doing in Mansfield this AMP, using sustainable methods to reduce flooding and cut the amount of water that gets into our network, and replicating it on a further 4 sites across our region. But there's more. On security, we'll be building new fencing at 29 of our sites, as well as implementing more nature-based solutions. We'll also be increasing our cybersecurity defenses, making our systems safer than ever.
We'll be bringing in more tankers so we can supply more than 130,000 customers with ultimate supplies for five days should the worst happen. We're increasing our dam inspection program to include another 45 smaller dams and lagoons. That entire enhancement program is huge, probably the biggest shakeup we've seen since privatization back in the late 1980s. It's a program that will make us much stronger and help us keep ahead of the pack. For example, our investment in expanding our Network Response Team means we have the ability to keep more people on supply when things go wrong. But when nothing goes wrong, which is most days, we can use those tankers to flush our network, to clean our pipes, to make sure there's less chance of discolored water or similar. It's another win-win. It's a similar story on the monitoring and telemetry investments.
The river monitors will not only allow us to report the data we're required to, but also give us incredibly useful information about what happens in certain weather conditions. We'll know what situations cause a particular storm overflow to spill, and that means we can predict what's going to happen and make changes that stop the overflow from spilling in the future. We can get on the front foot rather than just reacting to events. It's not just about the next five years, because this is just the start. The legal obligations I was referring to earlier aren't just for the next five years, but run much longer. Some finish in 2038, like removing the chemical phosphorus that gets in our wastewater and gets released into waterways. We're already on it and have removed a massive chunk from our works.
We'll be doing even more all the way out to 2038, but the majority of targets run out to 2050, such as CSO reductions to 10, reducing abstractions to support Environmental Destination, and Net Zero. So we're talking really big investments that will take place over the next 20-30 years and beyond. AMP 12 feels a long way out, but we're already planning for it. Now, there's no guarantee of what will give the go-ahead for every single penny in our plan, but we may not get everything we want. But we know that a significant part of it absolutely needs to happen. And in any eventuality, we're going to be a stronger, better company at the end of this process. We'll be able to clean up our rivers, make our services better and our networks safer, and grow our business.