FairWater Finale
How might we inspire service providers, manufacturers and policy makers to champion and adopt innovative intervention pathways to household water and energy efficiency?
Water services and water use in the home need to change to address water scarcity and climate warming, while ensuring affordability and protecting public health. However, many proposed innovations come at a cost or involve disruption to customers, their homes or habits. Many people will find it hard to change. Our Ofwat Innovation-funded project Transforming Customers' Lives: Integrated Pathways to Fair and Sustainable Water, FairWater for short, directly addresses the challenge of enabling enduring change, particularly for those that find change difficult.
FairWater has delivered an ambitious programme of engagement, monitoring and evaluation, taking a consumer-centric and task-based approach to water and energy efficiency, to generate some of the most detailed and long-term data on water use in homes ever recorded in the UK. Advanced sensors and software tools enabled us to collect, analyse and visualise task-specific water use. These insights are helping us to understand the effectiveness and acceptability of interventions across different households.
We now need your help to make the FairWater mission a reality, to envision how our transition pathways approach might be implemented at scale.
The pathways approach will rely on complementary interventions being delivered by multiple service providers and agencies, and for those interventions to be tailored to households’ specific needs and capabilities to ensure they are accessible and relevant.
We are inviting service providers, policy makers, regulators, academics, charities, social enterprises, manufactures and consumer goods producers, to come together to delve into the insights we’ve created to design and stress-test potential pathways.
Broadly, the week will follow this structured process of creative problem solving:
Day 1 (Monday)
Following the grand opening of the 2026 Innovation Festival, there’ll be an opportunity to meet the team, introduce yourself and learn more about FairWater and what we’ve achieved so far.
Day 2 (Tuesday)
The first full day is all about unpacking the problem, providing everyone with a shared understanding of the issue being tackled. Specifically, we’ll dive into the insights revealed through in-home testing and our wider engagement with customers and share our analysis of the acceptability and potential effectiveness of individual interventions, and how we see these working together to provide accessible and tailored pathways for households. Then it’s over to you to bring a fresh perspective to challenge our assumptions, scrutinise our analysis and refine our conclusions. We need to identify the enablers and barriers that are fundamental to the successful implementation of our pathways approach.
Day 3 (Wednesday)
Having develop a shared understanding of where the challenges might lie in implementing the pathways approach, we’ll set about co-creating solutions. We’ll explore the responsibilities and opportunities of energy and water companies, housing providers, landlords and local and national government in enabling a fair transition to water and energy efficiency. We’ll engage with our customers to ensure pathways remain affordable and accessible and with technology suppliers and product manufacturers to explore opportunities for disruptive innovation.
Day 4 (Thursday)
Our final day is about testing what we’ve developed, seeking feedback and applying it to refine our approach. We’ll break down solutions into defined actions and identify which of our key stakeholders will take the lead.
FairWater Finale will run all week and we’d be delighted if you can stay with us to work through the whole process. If not, then you’re equally welcome to join us for part of the week, just select the days you’re available in the registration process.