Published by: Policy in Practice
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Key Take Aways
Rising water bills in April 2025 are expected to drive an increase of 600,000 households relying on social tariffs, with potential growth to nearly 3 million by 2030, highlighting a significant affordability challenge.
Thames Water’s current outreach efforts to promote social tariff take-up face low awareness and application completion issues, indicating a need for innovative engagement strategies.
Auto-enrolment using data sharing agreements, particularly with benefits data, presents a viable approach to proactively identify and support households in water arrears, improving targeting accuracy.
The pilot demonstrates that matching water arrears data with benefits data can accurately identify eligible households — notably, 42.1% of matched customers in arrears were found to be eligible but not claiming social tariffs.
Auto-enrolment could increase social tariff take-up by approximately 9.1% among arr...
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