What drives Heidi Mottram, CEO of Northumbrian Water?

A few weeks ago one of Heidi Mottram’s team found Hadrian’s Wall - and that wasn’t even the highlight of her year.

The section of stone, about three metres long and 1,900 years old, was uncovered just a few inches below West Road, off the Two Ball Lonnen roundabout near Newcastle during roadworks to help improve water quality.

Now that sounds pretty impressive and Heidi, CEO of Northumbrian Water was delighted. But she is a busy woman – also Vice-Chair of the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, a member of the CBI Board, Vice-Chair of Newcastle University Council - as driven and energetic as ever after 11 years in the top job.

So there was delight and a welcome diversion for a few hours, and then back to work as the head of Northumbrian Water and Essex & Suffolk Water, which are both part of Northumbrian Water Limited – all wrapped up into Northumbrian Water Group.

She is a welcome sight at any business event, a hugely popular leader who has come to perfectly personify her own company.

So when NWG sets out its corporate values in these three sentences on its website, simply replacing ‘NWG’ with ‘Heidi’ in the right place gives a revealing picture of what she stands for:

“Heidi’s values are the set of guiding principles which collectively define who she is, what she does and how she does it.

“They make Heidi different from the rest, and allow her to make decisions and take actions which drive her towards our vision.

“Heidi’s values can be seen throughout the business, but they are at their most powerful when they are demonstrated through everything she does at every level to achieve her targets.”

It’s the mark of a CEO at the top of their game that definitions of them and their company are so interchangeable. It’s about values and what they stand for and for both the responsibility of looking after the environment has always been at the top of their agenda.

Neither has ever shied away from ambition, so when the Government committed the UK to a legally binding target of net zero emissions by 2050 - becoming the first major economy in the world to pass laws to end its contribution to global warming - she took the responsibility fully on her shoulders and has just pledged that her own company will beat that deadline by a remarkable 23 years.

It has also been approved to join the UN’s Race To Zero campaign, joining 120 countries, 454 cities, 23 regions, 1,397 businesses, 74 of the world’s biggest investors and 569 universities, in the largest ever Net Zero alliance.

Heidi Mottram

“This is a huge challenge, but we have come through so much already this year that I know we can get there,” Heidi told me.

“I am incredibly proud of what the team has achieved, providing essential water and waste water services because we all knew we simply had to keep going. We were agile in all our processes, including working from home prioritising our communication with customers, lifting and shifting people very quickly to get resource where we needed it.

“Going forwards I think we will see more hybrid working, we will collaborate in different ways and keep using some of the tools we have developed. We are also trying not to come up with strict rules at the moment, preferring to be flexible to suit what people need.

“That has always been a focus for us – I think we look after our people well and in turn they look forward to working for us and give us great productivity. What you soon realise is just how different people are – some are delighted to get back into the office and some are really benefitting for a different work-life balance.”

So the Group has been through the toughest of tests, but because of leadership and respect the company and its staff have come out of it ready to literally take on the world.

They are already well on their way to that 2027 Net Zero target, having slashed its carbon emissions from 303,000 tonnes in 2008 to just 56,000 tonnes in 2020.

Northumbrian Water also already powers all 1,886 of its sites using renewable electricity saving 125,000 tonnes of CO2 each year and has plans for new solar installations in the next 18 months, as well as the deployment of onshore wind at more sites.

It has set a blistering pace, starting with being the first company in the UK to have a ten-year offshore wind Power Purchase Agreement to source around 30% of its electricity demand from the Race Bank offshore wind farm off the coast of Norfolk.

Read more: Minister digs deep in project to map underground assets

“Northumbrian Water has always been an incredibly environmentally-conscious business and the journey to Net Zero goes back almost a decade, whereas some people have perhaps only woken up to this more recently,” said Heidi.

“So by then we already had things like the biggest hydro turbine in England, up at Kielder and then invested in ground-breaking Advanced Anaerobic Digestion plants in 2009, which no one else was doing on this sort of scale.

“This is what is now regularly known as ‘power from poo’ which can be put on the end of the waste water process and take the sludge, capture its calorific and gas content and convert it to power. We built our first big plant at Bran Sands on Teesside and then the same thing at Howden and we now take all the sewage sludge from the North East through either of them.

“We’re the only water company in the UK to do that and although we initially used that power to power our own treatment process but we now inject the bio-methane gas produced into the grid so customers get it back as gas to cook their dinner.

“It’s the perfect circular economy.”

What she says matters. People listen and respect and so they support.

The fact that she was awarded an OBE in 2010 for services to the rail industry, was North East Business Executive of the Year in 2017 and was awarded a CBE in 2018 for services to the water industry speaks for itself. So being able to talk about power from poo a few sentences away from helping save the world is quite a skill – but not too surprising from Heidi Mottram

Heidi Mottram addresses her audience

“We were taking on board the science at that time and we knew the world had to reduce its emissions, so I suppose we were first-footers from that point. But it is only in the last four or five years that the urgency and crisis level of the situation has landed on a lot of people.

“We have always been at the forefront which meant that we have now cut our emissions by a huge amount and the next thing we have to crack – along with a lot of work with solar power – is the conversion of our fleet of vehicles which is reliant on the market and how quickly companies are producing electric commercial vehicles.

“But then when we get to 2027 it is most certainly not ‘job done’ for us. We work massively with other supply chains and will see if we can help them in what they are doing, and we will look into things like how we construct the assets we use. There is still work to be done.

“The way we make sense of all this for customers is to talk about water efficiency because the more efficient they are about bringing water into their homes and using it – heating it for example - the more they will reduce their own footprint. They are becoming much more understanding of their own impact, but often don’t have too many tools to measure that easily.”

There’s that juxtaposition again. Individual customers looking after their morning showers and cuppas and hundreds of businesses combining to make a huge contribution to Net Zero.

“It is the job of businesses like ours to multi-task,” she explains.

“We look at all of these things - and take them all seriously - and then we look at our Balance Scorecard which has things on it like customer satisfaction with water colour and affordable bills, but also greenhouse gas emissions and protecting the environment. We know that if you focus too intently on one thing that can have unintended consequences, so we sat down and thought about what criteria we needed to be able to watch and then different parts of our company will focus on different things and then as a company we bring all that together.

Innovation Festival teamwork

“The team who do that every day are flippin’ brilliant and when people spend time with us they see how passionate our staff are about the things they do, and how much they care about what they do technically, each other as colleagues and customer safety. There is something very special about them and it is one of things that drew me to joining the company in 2010, that this was in the DNA of the company.

“We still seem to be able to draw the right sort of people in and don’t struggle to attract top talent that sees working for a water company as a compelling career because they can see how they can make a difference. We are recruiting a lot of apprentices at the moment and the talent across the North East is just superb.”

That skills pipeline is as valued as the water pipeline for NWG. They are big enough to make a difference to employment rates and the people they take on and develop have the chance to change things for the better, so welding that pipeline into place and making sure it brings in a constant supply is crucial. Heidi has her plan for that as well.

“Any company with any sense knows that it needs to nurture its workforce and we have so many connections in education and skills that we are in constant contact. Also, we have lots of employees who are school governors and have outreach programmes where we go into schools and talk to people as well as having partnerships with multiple schools, colleges, FE colleges and seven fantastic universities in the North East.

“We are constantly getting people excited and interested in what they can do with us and by having that level of contact we are also letting a lot of young people learn more about environmental issues generally. The ‘pester power’ of kids is pretty cool, so we have all found that very useful.”

A finely tuned ear for what young people look for and how to engage with them led to the Innovation Festivals, a series of events (virtual last time between 37 countries, and hopefully ‘live’ again this year) where innovators come together for sprints, hacks and dashes aimed at solving real world issues and problems alongside celebrity talks, networking, demos, music and comedy.

The festival atmosphere is the key here, with young minds freed from the classroom and not realising they are doing maths or physics when they are recruited to help solve an actual problem. They end up having a good time and feeling valued and want to do more, meaning they are potential recruits for Heidi and her team.

The idea has been so successful that this year it will hopefully be mirrored in Sydney as The Brilliant Get-Together thanks to a partnership with Sydney Water, allowing young people in both time zones to share challenges and solutions.

“There was a lot of innovation going on inside the company, so I set a challenge to my chief information officer Nigel Watson to see how we could accelerate or multiply that and draw some brilliant people in,” said Heidi.

“A little later, in the back of a taxi heading to an event he came up with the festival idea and we used the methodology of a Google Design Sprint to bring it all together and launched it at Newcastle Racecourse in 2017 bringing in people from all over the world.”

Coming right back to Hadrian’s Wall, it is often surprising what the NWG team find when they dig down into the grounds. True, it’s not often three metres of history but it can be other pipes and cables because the ground near developments can be quite crowded.

So keeping to the Innovation Festival approach, a number of utilities businesses got together to look at a possible register of underground assets so that each could see what the other had in a particular space. One of the reasons that hadn’t been possible before was an understandable commercial sensitivity around sharing information.

So the solution may well be a Snapchat strategy, where the information is shared for a very brief time to enable the dig to happen and then it disappears. It has taken a lot of time and date-sharing agreements, but a register should be announced soon.

From innovation and young people to customers and digging holes, I think the Mottram Method throughout is knowing how to make collaboration and co-operation work.

Which means knowing the other people involved well enough, respecting what they bring to the table and being so completely confident in your own offering, that you know the right time to work together on something bigger than its separate parts.

There are many things to admire about Heidi and her company but she certainly knows the value of teamwork, and her customers, colleagues and the planet are all seeing the benefit.

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