Suppliers

Procurement Act 2023

As a private utility, we are bound by the Utilities Contract Regulations 2016 (UCR 2016) when we are procuring goods, services and works. In 2025, the new Procurement Act will replace the existing UCR2016 and there will be an impact to suppliers looking to win contracts from United Utilities Water.

If your business supplies goods, works or services to United Utilities Water or hopes to do so in the future, we would encourage you to read the information detailed on the link below which has been produced by the Government Commercial Function. This provides information you will need to be aware of, most notably registering for the new Central Digital Platform (which replaces ‘Find a Tender’).

Find out more

All our procurement activity is carried out by our commercial department, whose objective is to support our purpose to provide great water and more for the North West. We build relationships with our key partners and suppliers based on common values to achieve our goals.

We conduct business with around 1,700 suppliers every year, from major international corporations to sole traders. We are committed to meeting our obligations to our suppliers, measuring our progress whilst dealing fairly and ethically at all times.

Our approach to supply chain activity is based on category management which takes a long term holistic view of our demand, specifications and the supplier market to deliver the appropriate contract strategy. Throughout this process we’re encouraging commercial awareness from market to company and encouraging competition wherever necessary.

Our third party spend is around £1.1 billion per annum and consolidated into a number of categories which reflect similar commercial considerations and supply markets, with each category having a dedicated commercial manager. For more key information about our commercial department, please visit our ‘About our service’ page.

We are committed to making our services better, faster, cheaper and safer for our customers and the environment. But we know that in order to do this we need to be innovative and find new ideas to help us. If you have an idea or product that will help us overcome some of our biggest challenges please take a look here.