Amount awarded: £1,849,851
Led by: Northumbrian Water
Partners: Accenture PLC, Affinity Water, Anglian Water, BU-UK, Cadent Gas Ltd, Consumer Council for Water, Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, ICOSA Water Ltd, Microsoft PLC, Northern Gas Networks, Ordnance Survey, Southern Water, Thames Water, UK Power Networks Ltd, United Utilities, Virgin MediaO2, Wessex Water, Yorkshire Water
Support-for-All will be a national, secure, cross-sector platform sharing Priority Services Register (PSR) and other vulnerability data between water, energy, telecommunication and support organisations, ensuring a better experience for vulnerable customers. Supporting a ‘tell-us-once’ approach and utilitising enhanced matching, customers will receive consistent and accurate support across their utility services.
“The success of our “Support For All” pilot proved that by energy and water working together, thousands of additional customers can get the help they need. We’re extremely proud further funding has been granted, ensuring customers in vulnerable circumstances benefit from energy and water support across the whole of England.” – Mark Wilkinson, Head of Income, Northumbrian Water
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This initiative builds on the Breakthrough 2 funded project, Support for All.
The project to create a national platform capable of securely sharing the service needs of customers in vulnerable circumstances is on track. Governance and reporting is agreed, in place and the project delivery plan has been finalised with dependencies and gateways outlined. Security and infrastructure documents have been shared by the technology partner Avanade whose team is resourced and operational. The build of the system on scalable architecture for the agreed design spec is well underway which includes essential changes to functionality and improved performance from the pilot. Build has been completed of the platform for partner API customer registrations and serviced properties as well as bulk upload of data, with an automation process in place to build, test and deploy. A series of design workshops have finalised reporting and dashboarding, address deletion/changes of address, data matching and how to handle data outside water and energy. Alongside the technology build, a Data Protection Team was mobilised, procured for and led by an external lawyer and have produced collective data sharing agreements, along with data sharing protocols which cover different section data sharing. Standard operating procedures and data protection impact assessments have also been completed.
