New Appointments and Variations (NAV)

What are NAV's?

The Water Industry Act 1991 incorporates legislation which makes provision for sites within an existing undertaker’s area to be served by another undertaker. Where an alternative undertaker is appointed, a NAV is made by Ofwat.

There are three circumstances in which a NAV can be granted:

• Where the premises of one or more customers is supplied (or is likely to be supplied) with at least 50 mega litres of water per year.
• Where no premises within the area are served by an appointed company i.e. the site is ‘unserved’. This includes areas which are supplied by private, unregulated supplies.
• If the existing appointed company consents to the transfer of that area.

The alternative supplier (the “NAV appointee”) will hold an Instrument of Appointment and therefore have all the same duties and responsibilities to the customers within the NAV appointment site as the previous statutory supplier.

Every NAV must have access to adequate water resources in order to service the customers on the site. If the site is within the Affinity Water statutory area of supply and the NAV does not have direct access to its own water resources, these services can be purchased from Affinity Water Wholesale.

For water, this is purchased in the form of a bulk supply of water delivered to an agreed point, usually at the site boundary.

The supply of these services is governed by legal agreements, which are negotiated between the parties.

Nav Charges

What are your NAV charges?

We have prepared a draft document that sets out our charges to NAVs, which you can open or download here. We intend to publish the final version of this document in due course. If you have any comments on our draft document then please click here to email us your comments.