Essentially, we were created to put the customer voice right at the heart of the process that Douglas Millican and his colleagues were describing. The question that we constantly ask Scottish Water is, how is what you are proposing in the interests of customers? If it can give us convincing answers, we will go along with that. If it cannot, we will ask it to go and reconsider, to come back with different proposals, to drop a proposal or to maybe introduce a new proposal. That is the kind of disposition we take.
We are just individuals, like any other citizens, so how do we have legitimacy in making any points to Scottish Water? We try to do that by putting ourselves in the place of customers and asking the questions that they would ask if they had the chance to quiz Scottish Water, as we do every month. We try to get some rigour into all that and represent customers in that way. However, our real legitimacy comes from understanding what customers themselves think. To that end, we do a lot of research with other stakeholders in the industry. One of the members of the forum chairs a body called the research co-ordinating group, on which we sit, and on which Citizens Advice Scotland, Scottish Water, SEPA, the DWQR, the Scottish Government and the WIC also sit. Sometimes the organisations in the group commission research jointly and sometimes they commission research individually, in co-ordination with the other organisations in the group, who also check it out. We have done something like 20 research exercises in the last couple of years, through which we have engaged many hundreds, if not thousands, of customers. On top of that, Scottish Water conducts regular customer engagement and feedback, and we get access to all of that data if we want it. There is a big process of engagement in that sense.
Let me mention one of our more recent exercises. We do quantitative surveys of people and recently we did a big exercise involving about 100 people, with groups of citizens in Hawick, Falkirk, Fort William, Glasgow and Dundee, I think. We spent a day with them—not us personally, but people on our behalf—talking about issues around the water industry and what they might mean for people, and then working out whether people’s opinions are shifting on the basis of the further information that they get. We wanted to find out what are they actually saying about their water service and what they think about it. We try to get an understanding of a series of issues in that way and then we come back to our regular meetings with all the stakeholders to develop the strategic plan, and we use that data to articulate and argue quite strongly, on occasion, for positions on behalf of customers in that process. That is, essentially, how we work.
One thing that has guided our work—the committee might want to see this—is a document that we put into the conversation that was happening just over a year ago about the social contract between the people who pay their bills and Scottish Water, in terms of the services that the company offers them. It covers a range of things, starting from the premise that, because Scottish Water is a publicly owned company, the citizens have high expectations of it. High ethical standards are required. It must be open and transparent in all that it does. Not only does it have to deliver clean water and take our waste away and clean it before it puts it back into the environment, it has to relate to its communities more effectively in future. In particular, it has to pursue a one-planet approach to prosperity, increasingly cutting carbon emissions and so on. We made about 20-odd points in that document, which the committee might find quite helpful. It states what customers want in return for the money that we pay for the service. I hope that that answers your question.