To deliver the best possible outcomes for customers and the wider community, we know we must work together.
Partnership working creates a host of new opportunities, brings increased benefit for customers, for the land, and for the water, and ensures we’re delivering the right solution in the right place.
Our partnership with Northern Roots is an example of how we’re working with organisations that are best placed to create an innovative model of community-led behaviour change that can be adopted by communities elsewhere across the UK.
Northern Roots is a project to create the UK’s largest urban farm and country park on 160 acres of under-used green space in the heart of Oldham, in Greater Manchester. Developed for and with local communities, the vision for Northern Roots is to create sustainable economic, social and environmental benefits for those communities. This includes working to enhance the quality of the large volume of water that runs through the Northern Roots site and into the River Medlock.
Partnership working creates a host of new opportunities, brings increased benefit for customers, for the land, and for the water, and ensures we’re delivering the right solution in the right place.
We identified Oldham as an area with relatively poor performance in terms of sewer blockages, and sewer litter impacting the receiving environment. We partnered with Northern Roots to create a unique new project, working with local communities in Glodwick to better understand practices and behaviours linked to non-flushable items, such as wet wipes and nappies being flushed down toilets, or fats, oils and grease being poured down drains. The project used creative activities to empower local residents to take simple steps to change behaviour – which is more cost efficient and sustainable than clearing blockages or resolving the problems caused by unsafe sewer behaviour.
In-depth discussions, focus groups and personal interviews were carried out with residents, with the research highlighting a fundamental lack of awareness of what constitutes unsafe sewer behaviour. Residents emphasised the need for simple, educational communication and recommended a tailored approach to resonate with different demographics. The research has given us a baseline from which the impact of future campaigns in the area can be measured, allowing us to produce effective campaigns for sewer safety in the future.
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