UK water companies manage stakeholder engagement during asset management programmes by centralising every interaction, community, political, regulatory and customer in one shared platform. Each capital project draws on the same stakeholder record, so engagement stays coordinated across programmes, and evidence of who was engaged, when and how is ready for Ofwat, planning inspectors and the public.
The scale of the task has just stepped up. In December 2024, Ofwat approved £104 billion of investment for AMP8, the asset management period running from 2025 to 2030, the largest programme of water infrastructure work in decades. Every reservoir, treatment works, and network upgrade in that programme carries a consultation duty, and each one affects stakeholders who are already being engaged by someone else in the business.
What makes engagement different during an asset management programme?
An asset management programme isn't one project; it's a five-year portfolio of them, running alongside day-to-day operations. That's what makes the engagement hard. A water company in AMP8 might simultaneously be consulting on a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP), engaging communities around a dozen smaller capital schemes, briefing MPs on storm overflow performance and responding to a live operational incident.
The same stakeholders turn up in all of them. The MP asking about river quality is also the MP whose constituency hosts your new treatment works. The parish council responding to a reservoir consultation was contacted last month about roadworks. When project teams work from separate stakeholder lists, the result is four uncoordinated approaches from one company and no single view of the relationship.
That’s why the organisations doing this well work from a single stakeholder graph: stakeholders, organisations and affiliations are recorded once, visible to every project team with the appropriate permissions, and engagement activity is rolled up to programme level.
How do water companies keep engagement evidence regulator-ready?
Consultation in the water sector has to hold up to scrutiny. The Gunning Principles remain the legal test for public consultation, and Ofwat's price review process expects companies to show how customer and stakeholder views shaped their plans. For NSIPs, the Planning Inspectorate examines the consultation record itself, and gaps become risks.
None of that can be demonstrated without a dated, searchable record of who was engaged, how, and what they said. Tractivity enables teams to capture emails, meetings, events, survey responses and feedback against a single stakeholder record, creating an auditable evidence base they can access instantly. Across sectors, that shift delivers around a 20% efficiency gain per engagement professional - typically £5,000–£8,200 a year - by eliminating much of the reporting and record-keeping admin.
How Anglian Water engages 13,000+ stakeholders across a £10 billion programme
Anglian Water is delivering around £10 billion of investment over five years, including the Cambridge Wastewater Treatment Plant Relocation, an NSIP, and the Lincolnshire and Fens reservoirs. Its Public Affairs Regional Engagement team manages more than 13,000 stakeholders in Tractivity, covering day-to-day engagement and major projects in the same system, with political data kept current through the Mapolitical integration.
'Tractivity runs our live interactive, day-to-day stakeholder programme, which is invaluable to us. It saves time and provides fantastic insight and reporting outputs that we can present to our Executive Committee on performance and engagement.' - Grant Tuffs, Regional Engagement Manager, Anglian Water
When something happens that the company is required to communicate, the team captures the engagement, runs the numbers and hands the evidence straight to the regulator. The same record serves routine briefings and live incidents.
How Severn Trent runs capital projects alongside customer engagement
Severn Trent manages engagement for its £60 million Thermal Hydrolysis Plant at Minworth and the Upper Derwent Valley Reservoir Expansion through the same platform used to deliver wider planning research that engaged 32,000 customers, analysed 24,000 complaints and built a 15,000-member online community.
The lesson from both companies is the same: project consultation and ongoing engagement can't live in separate systems. Split them, and you get duplicate records, inconsistent reporting and stakeholders who feel like strangers to a company they've dealt with for years.
What should a water company look for in stakeholder management software?
Four things matter most for AMP-scale stakeholder engagement:
-
A shared stakeholder record across projects and teams, with role-based permissions
-
A complete, exportable audit trail of every interaction
-
Built-in consultation, survey and mass communication tools that keep the record complete
-
The security accreditations procurement expects, including ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus and G-Cloud listing.
Generic CRMs struggle here because they model a sales pipeline, not many-to-many stakeholder relationships across parallel programmes. A purpose-built SRM platform models the stakeholder once and the projects around them.
Why water companies choose Tractivity
Tractivity is purpose-built for stakeholder engagement, not adapted from a database, project management tool or sales CRM. Every interaction - from an NSIP consultation response to a quick call with a parish councillor - is captured against a single stakeholder record, shared across teams and fully auditable. Public-sector accreditations, including ISO 27001:2022, Cyber Essentials Plus, NHS DSPT and G-Cloud 14, are built in rather than bolted on. That’s why organisations such as Anglian Water and Severn Trent use Tractivity to manage stakeholder relationships at scale.
Book a personalised demo to see how the platform would handle your AMP8 engagement in practice.
Frequently asked questions
