Severn Trent Plc

Good morning and welcome to the 7Trend results presentation half year Q&A session. We've got myself, Helen and the entire senior team here and of course the new chief exec of 7Trend, James Jessick is also with us and obviously this is my final results presentation so we'll be trying to get lots of questions on the business topics and on the results. We're pleased with our performance over the last six months and we look forward to taking questions on them. So Sarah, over to you first.

A good morning. Oh, well, we knew the day would come, Liv. To simply say thank you feels way too small given everything you've done. But until I think of something better, I'll just leave it with thank you. James, a much deserving successor. Super thrilled, super excited for you, for the team and for everything that lies ahead. But I guess it is on with the show. So a couple of questions from me, please, on the results today. Firstly, on that ODI guidance upgrade, I mean, you could have waited until deeper into winter to upgrade, but you didn't. Wondering what gives you conviction to upgrade that guidance today? Then a cheeky half question, please, on the AMP8 total ODI guide. Do we get to increase that by 15 million pounds today too? I suspect the answer is no on that. And then the final one, please, and while we're on the outperformance topic, but parking ODIs, wondering what other tools are in the 7Trent toolkit that can contribute to sustained strong total outperformance in the next few years, and I promise I'm not asking numbers, just more initiatives and areas of opportunity. Thank you.

Brilliant. Okie dokie then. So first of all, thank you very much. There are 11,700 renters that wear their socks off every day to land that performance and they will be really pleased that we've started strongly. So let's go for the half question first. We're not giving you more of an upgrade than the at least 300 million. So it is a strong first six months and we've still got four and a half years to go, but we will keep that under review and we'll share more news at the right point in time. In terms of why we're so confident, I'm going to have to say, but I mean, fundamentally, you'll have seen we're saying three things. The first thing we're saying is that about 90% of measures are green, and that means we're doing very well across the entire basket of ODIs, and that's what gives us confidence, because you will always have some ups and downs over the winter period, as you said. The second thing is quite a lot of measures, they do close off at the calendar year end. So there are, I remember, a number of measures where we're actually 10 and a half months through the performance and that gives us a chance to give some indication of those. So that's also helpful. Pollution, spills are good examples there where they're almost complete for the year, which helps us give clearer guidance now at this stage than maybe later in the year. And the third thing is that we're just really getting into our mojo operationally. It's a brand new five year period. We felt confident that now that the measures were against the sector, they're like for like against everybody else. We always thought that our overwhelming strong performance would come through and that's beginning to come through. So, Steph, which of the measures are you excited about on the ODIs?