Water companies miss leakage targets

More than a quarter of all water companies in England and Wales failed to do enough to manage leakage, the regulator Ofwat said yesterday. Although companies continued to provide a good service to most consumers, six out of 21 companies failed to meet their leakage targets, according to the regulator's annual report.

The worst offender was Yorkshire Water, which lost on average 295 million litres a day in the 2009/10 period. The other companies which missed their targets were Cambridge, Dee Valley, Northumbrian, Southern and Veolia Central.

However, the report said the failures occurred in the context of the coldest winter for more than 30 years, when snow-covered ground made identifying leaks harder.