AT A time of the year when many customers will receive their water bills, I’d like to explain how we have acted to reduce the burden on household budgets.

Over the next six years we plan to cut our profits to keep water bills as low as possible. This year the average household bill will only rise in line with inflation to £373, up from an average of £368 last year.

Yorkshire’s bills are among the lowest in the country and we recently consulted 30,000 customers in the biggest such exercise carried out by a water company.

Customers said they expected the same service, but that bills should be kept as low as possible. We have promised to limit any change in prices to inflation during 2014-15, and are also proposing to continue to do that for the next five years.

We maintain more than 62,000 miles of pipes (five per cent of which are more than 100 years old), 700 water treatment works and 133 reservoirs, and we do still need to spend money on repairing and maintaining this infrastructure.

In doing so we create a ripple effect of investment back into the region, which has been calculated by Leeds University to be £93 for every £100 we spend.

Richard Flint, Chief executive, Yorkshire Water.