Celebrating 10 years of developer forum events
18 June 2021
This year, we’re marking the milestone of a decade of hosting regular engagement events with our developer services customers, which include organisations like housebuilders and housing associations.
In that time, we estimate we’ve held around 50 events, with the developer forums themselves becoming a key part of our programme of engagement. In the time before COVID, the forums involved holding two physical events a year where we’d update customers on their priority areas, such as new regulation, improvements we’ve made to our service and hear valuable feedback on how customers were experiencing working with us on new water and sewerage connections.
The last year has brought with it two things: as house builders across our operational area adapted to the new government restrictions, it confirmed for us just how important it is for us to regularly engage with our developer customers so that we could hear their concerns and feedback. It also highlighted just how important the new connections services we provide to housebuilders are – given the contribution this makes to the UK economy and to people’s general wellbeing.
For the second time this year, earlier this week we hosted our developer customer forum via a Microsoft Teams call. This enabled all our customers together in one single session, unlike when we previously held two physical events, one in north Wales and another in south Wales. It also meant that we could use Microsoft Teams’ poll feature to gather important feedback from attendees on hot industry issues.
With over 50 attendees, topics ranged from constructing sustainable drainage solutions over infrastructure, the issue of phosphate levels when it comes to the planning of new developments, the proposed changes to charging rules that Ofwat consulted on earlier this year and fire sprinkler systems.
We’d like to thank everyone who joined us and made the forum a success. And most of all – thank you to our developer customers for taking part in our virtual format, asking those ever-insightful questions and openly sharing their thoughts on key industry topics.
If you’re interested in attending future developer forums, please email developer.services@dwrcymru.com and we will add you to our mailing list.