Water collections under PR24: delivering while the regulator changes

PR24 is no longer something to prepare for. The 2025 to 2030 price control is in force, the £104 billion investment programme is under way, and bills have risen to fund it. Meanwhile the regulator that wrote it is being replaced: the January 2026 White Paper confirmed a single supervisory regulator for water, with Ofwat's duties transferring once legislation passes. Our guide, Preparing for water's regulatory reset, covers what that means for collections teams.

What hasn't changed is the operational bar. PR24's service expectations still apply through the transition, support for customers struggling to pay is expected to double, and water continues to be measured against the wider utility sector. The playbook below is how collections software meets that bar, whoever holds the pen.

Modern collections software can help you:
Gain better insight into your debt portfolio
Maximise automation, and
Control costs
By improving your understanding of customer circumstances, you can achieve faster payments, more sustainable arrangements and better take-up of social tariffs.

Here are the essential steps that help you meet the targets PR24 set out:

Make the move to real-time collections

Eliminating the "Data Gap" in service delivery

Real-time capability is not a luxury; it is the infrastructure required to meet PR24's service standards. By enabling zero-latency updates, you ensure every interaction is based on the customer's actual, current situation.

• The compliance win: Respond instantly to signs of financial distress, preventing foreseeable harm.
• The efficiency win: Stop wasting budget on chase communications for bills that were paid an hour ago.
• The social tariff win: Identify eligible customers in the moment, ensuring support reaches those who need it most before debt spirals.

Unified communications: Ending channel chaos

One story, every channel

The Paying Fair guidelines require that customers have a genuine choice in how they communicate. However, choice without coordination creates risk. If a customer's digital journey doesn't match their phone conversation, trust is lost, and complaints rise.

• The unified hub: By centralising interactions into a single system, you ensure a "digital-first" journey feels as empathetic and informed as a human one.
• Frictionless support: When agents see the full history of SMS, email, and portal clicks instantly, the customer never has to repeat their story, a core expectation of the Paying Fair guidelines.

Turning raw data into actionable intelligence

Breaking free from legacy silos

You cannot deliver a step-change in performance if your data is locked in disjointed systems. To meet PR24's innovation mandate, you need a flexible data structure that can:

• Ingest: Absorb data from internal billing and external credit or vulnerability sets at speed.
• Adapt: Handle changing data formats without months of IT development.
• Predict: Use real-time behaviour to refine strategies, moving from one-size-fits-all to truly personalised repayment plans.

Bulletproof compliance via event sourcing

Making audits painless and truth unchangeable

Regulatory scrutiny is intensifying, and the incoming supervisory model asks for evidence account by account. Proving you have treated a customer fairly shouldn't require a weeks-long manual data exercise.

Modern collections software uses event sourcing, which creates an unbreakable, chronological chain of evidence for every action taken on an account.

• The single source of truth: Prove exactly who did what, when, and why.
• The continuous audit: When the regulator asks for evidence of social tariff promotion or vulnerability support, the answer is available in seconds, not days.

Empowering a can-do team culture

Give your internal experts the tools

Legacy systems stifle innovation. When a simple strategy change takes six months of IT tickets, your best people get demoralised.

A modern system turns your team from administrators into innovators.

By giving your collections specialists the tools to configure strategies and test new approaches in a "no-code" environment, you transform your department from a cost centre into a hub of operational excellence.

The benchmark through the transition

With support for customers in payment difficulty expected to double under PR24, and a supervisory regulator arriving mid-period, the pressure on water collections is high and rising.

The sector has a choice: continue with the status quo and risk being on the wrong side of the transition, or adopt the cloud-native, real-time tools that make the targets achievable. The companies that come through the reset strongest will be those that realise the best customer outcome is also the best commercial outcome.