Scottish Water Brand Guidelines: Three Authorities Merged in 2002, Still Publicly Owned

An Act of the Scottish Parliament, 2002.

Scottish Water was created by an Act of the Scottish Parliament. The Water Industry (Scotland) Act 2002, passed by the Parliament on 14 February 2002 and given Royal Assent on 1 March 2002, says in section 20 that “there is established a body corporate to be known as Scottish Water.” English Wikipedia describes the new body as a merger of the West of Scotland, East of Scotland and North of Scotland Water Authorities.

Those three authorities were themselves fairly new. The English Wikipedia article on water supply and sanitation in Scotland says that before 1945 some 210 separate organisations were involved in supplying drinking water, and that from 1946 local authorities were required to provide a supply to their communities. The Water (Scotland) Act 1967 drew the smaller suppliers into 13 Regional Water Boards; after the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, responsibility passed to nine regional councils and an islands area, which also took over sewage treatment from 234 separate bodies.

The Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 then merged the councils’ water and sewerage responsibilities into the three regional authorities, the same article says. Unlike the regional water authorities of England and Wales, which were privatised in 1989, the industry in Scotland remained in the public sector, and the 2002 Act brought the three together as one national body.

The Act also deals with regulation and customers. Its first part covers the Water Industry Commission for Scotland and panels to represent water customers, in the revised text published on legislation.gov.uk.

A statutory corporation and its regulators.

Scottish Water is a statutory corporation, wholly owned by the Scottish Government and accountable to the public through it, English Wikipedia says; the BBC described it in September 2014 as a “publicly-owned company.” It is based at Stepps and has offices in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness, with about 3,600 staff. National policy is set by the Scottish Government, to which it reports; it is funded by customers’ charges, and part of its long-term capital spending is funded by loans from the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government has also consulted on how Scottish Water could work with Scottish Canals and Caledonian Maritime Assets to draw more public benefit from the country’s water-related infrastructure, English Wikipedia says.

It supplies drinking water to 2.46 million households and 150,000 business customers, English Wikipedia says, putting 1.34 billion litres of drinking water into supply each day and taking away 847 million litres of waste water for treatment before returning it to the environment. Its network includes more than 47,000 kilometres of water pipes, about 50,000 kilometres of sewers, 297 water treatment works and 1,837 waste water treatment works, a figure that includes 1,206 septic tanks, according to the article on water in Scotland.

Several regulators oversee it. Under the Water Services etc. (Scotland) Act 2005, the economic regulator, the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, sets charges independently by benchmarking against the private water companies of England and Wales, and Scottish Water can appeal against its decisions to the UK competition authority. The Drinking Water Quality Regulator for Scotland and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency also regulate it, and the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman can investigate customer complaints.

The 2005 Act also opened “retail services” — metering, billing and customer service — for business customers to competition from 2008, English Wikipedia says, while wholesale services, providing water and removing waste water, remain a public monopoly. Licensed retailers buy wholesale services and compete for business customers.

How water utilities present themselves.

Water utilities sell something nobody sees being made. Their identities therefore lean on a small set of images: blue and green palettes, droplet and wave marks, and reservoirs, treatment works and pipelines photographed from the air. The look is meant to read as calm and dependable, closer to a public service than to a consumer brand, even when the company is investor-owned and listed on a stock exchange.

Much of a utility’s visible design work is practical. Bill explainers, tariff tables, payment-help schemes and outage maps make up a large share of its website, and the tone is plain and procedural. Many companies run several regional or state brands under one parent, so a naming system and a shared set of colours often matter more than any single logo.

Messaging changes with the weather and the regulator. Leak-repair campaigns, drought appeals and hosepipe or watering restrictions appear in dry years; investment programmes, pipe-replacement work and rate cases appear in filings and press releases. Environmental performance reports and sustainability reports set out targets and results in charts and tables, usually in the same restrained palette as the rest of the brand.

The last strand is education. Utilities run school visits, careers programmes, treatment-plant tours and community grants, and they publish material on how water is treated and why pipes need replacing. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when it began, who owns it and how it describes itself — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Investment programmes and benchmarks.

Investment is set through a planning process the Scottish Government calls “Quality and Standards.” English Wikipedia says its third round, covering 2006 to 2015, was one of the largest capital investment programmes in the UK, with more than 2,000 individual projects split between maintaining existing service and improving drinking water quality, environmental performance and customer service.

In September 2014 the BBC reported the next round: a six-year programme for 2015–21, supported by borrowing from the Scottish government and expected to support about 5,000 jobs. The projects it listed included improvements to water mains and treatment works, drinking water improvements in places including Aberdeenshire, Fair Isle and South Uist, and a waste water tunnel in Glasgow intended to improve water quality in the River Clyde and reduce flooding.

The water industry commission measures its record against the companies of England and Wales. The article on water in Scotland says Scottish Water’s score on the commission’s overall performance assessment index rose from 162 in 2003–04 to 400 in 2014–15, that its operating spending fell by almost 40% between 2001–02 and 2009–10, and that leakage fell from 1,104 megalitres a day in 2005–06 to 544 megalitres a day in 2014–15. For 2014–15, English Wikipedia adds, Scottish Water reported outcomes comparable with the recent performance of leading water companies in England and Wales.

For a design guide, Scottish Water shows how one publicly owned body can present water and sewerage services for a whole country. Compare Welsh Water, the not-for-profit company owned by Glas Cymru, and United Utilities, which serves north-west England. For this guide we use a loch navy, a heather purple and granite grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Scottish Water’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.