Water Plus warns of business blind spot on water supply disruption

Water Plus has warned businesses are poorly prepared for water supply disruptions, which will have consequences for their productivity.

The country’s largest retailer released research which found only 11% of small to medium sized enterprises have a plan in place to operate without water, compared with around 34% of larger businesses. Meanwhile, 21% of the 600 firms surveyed who had a supply disruption of some kind over the last 12 months – from frozen pipes to an outage – saw productivity fall.

Water Plus observed that the proportion of businesses proactively planning to deal with a water outage remains unchanged from an identical study it conducted in 2017, “indicating that increasingly unpredictable seasonal weather has had little impact on company attitudes to water which is worrying given the impact an outage can have on business”.

Scott MacIndeor, head of advanced services at Water Plus, said: “It’s clear that there is a business blind-spot when it comes to being prepared. It’s critical that organisations and sites put plans in place to ensure they’re able to operate without too much disruption and return to business-as-usual as quickly as possible in the event of a leak, frozen pipe or water network outage.”