Severn Trent Plc

Brilliant. Good morning, everybody. I'm James Jessica, Chief Executive of 7Trend. And I just want to welcome all of you to my first results announcement. Obviously, 7Trend's annual results I'm joined here today, obviously, with Helen and the rest of the executive. I hope you've all had a chance to look through our results presentation, and we're looking forward to some really interesting questions. Now, before we start, there is a raise hand function. That is the best way to get yourself onto the system, and we look forward to the questions. So, I think there's already somebody in the queue. So, Julius, good morning. How are you?

Good morning, all good. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. I have two unsurprisingly on the topic of reopeners. So the first one is how did you come to this like 600 million number that you've announced today and how should we view this going forward for the next reopeners in the next coming years? Is that like a number that we could expect every year or does it depend on basically clarity on the remuneration of this? And that kind of leads me then to the second question. How do you think about funding from here? Because, I mean, I guess the $600 million is fully funded with your balance sheet, but do you believe there would be equity needs down the line if more opportunities like this come along? That would be quite useful. Thank you.

Thank you, Julius. Well, I'll give them an overview, and then I will hand to Shane to cover some of the specifics within the re-owner submission. So, first and foremost, We've got a really strong track record of delivering RCV growth. And you've seen just from this AMP in terms of our final determination, the 15 billion will deliver 60% RCV growth over that period. And when you compare that to the sector average of 50%, that's really strong. The way we've approached the re-opener process is really take into account all the things, obviously, that we've already got in flight. So let's not forget, as part of our fund determination, we secured for cyber, for PFAS, and for growth. And the re-opener process includes considerations around asset health, cyber, PFAS, and growth. So a lot of those we have already got covered through our business planning process. But what we are thinking about and how we arrived at the 600 million is how do we prepare our thoughts and our plans for the future? So we're already cognizant of AMP9 and transition spend and all that good stuff. So we're really thinking about how the re-opener process may actually help us in terms of that particular plan. And our focus has really been on how do we use particularly the asset health aspects to provide further information and details to support those plans going forward. So, in terms of what might happen for round twos and threes, we're not going to comment on that at the moment today. I'll come back to the equity answer in a second after Shane just puts more colour on the re-opening.