How Pennon Group built a flexible, secure speak-up program at scale

Pennon Group is one of the UK’s leading environmental infrastructure companies, operating in both regulated and commercial markets. Its regulated water businesses—South West Water, Bristol Water, Bournemouth Water, and Sutton & East Surrey Water—provide essential services to millions of households across the South West and South of England.

Beyond water, Pennon is also expanding into renewable energy to actively hedge against rising energy costs, ensuring sustainable and cost-effective operations in an industry where energy consumption is high.

Within this context, Pennon’s whistleblowing program plays a vital role. Led by Group Deputy General Counsel Barry Matthews, the program ensures that employees, suppliers, and contractors have a safe channel to raise concerns, an area of heightened importance following the UK's Water Services Regulation Authority or Ofwat’s review of whistleblowing practices across the sector.

The challenge of meeting regulatory requirements with inflexible legacy systems

The water industry in the UK operates under constant scrutiny from customers, politicians, the media, and regulators. In 2022, Ofwat, the industry regulator, launched a review of whistleblowing practices across the sector. As a “prescribed person” under UK law, Ofwat has a statutory duty to provide external whistleblowing channels, making it essential that regulated companies maintain strong, transparent internal program.

For Pennon, this created both an opportunity and a challenge. The Group wanted to go beyond regulatory minimums by:

• Providing accessible reporting channels to employees, suppliers, and contractors, recognizing that risks and ethical concerns can arise across the value chain.

• Aligning with best-practice standards emerging from Ofwat’s consultation and subsequent industry workshops, in which Barry Matthews actively participated.

• Strengthening trust in the whistleblowing process at a time when the sector faced increased public criticism.
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However, Pennon’s existing whistleblowing platform was not providing them with the opportunity to reach the standards they were striving for due to several reasons.

Inefficiency and rigidity
The system lacked the flexibility to configure intake questions, adapt case recording, case fields, or categorization, slowing investigations as routine changes as the Group expanded and internal processes change required vendor tickets

Cumbersome analytics leading to delays
Data needed re-engineering before it could be used to easily generate the kind of reporting compliance officers needed, making reporting clunky and time-consuming.

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As Barry Matthews explained:

“We wanted to make sure we were not adapting our processes to fit the system, instead of the system supporting our processes. We wanted to go above and beyond what we had were currently providing and SpeakUp allowed us to achieve this.”

With the contract coming up for renewal, Pennon launched a thorough review of the market.

Why Pennon Group chose SpeakUp

After evaluating several platforms, Pennon selected SpeakUp to power its whistleblowing program. Pennon identified several decision drivers that led them to choose SpeakUp.

Flexibility and configurability
SpeakUp offered the ability to customize how cases are ingested, which questions are asked, and the configuration of the assigned forms and subsequent workflows. This meant the compliance team could adapt the platform to the needs of different business units without external vendor support.

Seamless reporting and integration
Data captured in SpeakUp could be exported directly into Excel and connected to Pennon’s internal Power BI dashboards. This removed the bottleneck of clunky reporting and enabled real-time insights for management and regulators.

Strong information security credentials
SpeakUp performed exceptionally well in Pennon’s Risk Ledger procurement assessment, particularly in the InfoSec module.  

Transparency in the sales process
The clarity and honesty of SpeakUp’s team also stood out. Rather than overselling, they provided a realistic view of what the platform could and couldn’t do, building confidence early in the process.

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"I’ve seen many promising systems fall at the last hurdle because they couldn’t satisfy our IT security team requirements. SpeakUp’s InfoSec story was robust from day one, which made my life a lot easier.”

- Barry Matthews, Group Deputy General Counsel at Pennon Group

Making the transition with ease and speed

Implementation had to happen quickly, with only a narrow window between the expiry of Pennon’s old contract and the onboarding of SpeakUp. Thanks to close collaboration between SpeakUp, Barry’s team, and internal stakeholders, the transition was delivered smoothly and without disruption.  

“The primary reason we chose SpeakUp was flexibility—how we could configure reporting, how cases flow into our systems, and how easily we can use the data in Power BI. Add to that the strong InfoSec credentials and the transparency of the team, and it was a clear decision,” says Barry.

SpeakUp was rolled out across Pennon’s regulated water businesses, Pennon Power and extended to suppliers and contractors, reflecting the Group’s commitment to transparency across the value chain.

Regaining confidence in their whistleblowing program

Since implementing SpeakUp, Pennon has achieved several improvements in its whistleblowing program:

• Greater flexibility: Compliance teams save significant time by managing changing requirements to reflect organizational changes, without waiting for vendor intervention.

• Greater efficiency: Compliance officers can respond quickly to changing management reporting requirements through changes to the back end to create new documents for ingest into the Power BI tool.  

• Regulatory alignment: SpeakUp supports Pennon’s compliance with Ofwat’s best-practice guidance and positions the company as a leader in industry forums.

Barry Matthews sums it up:
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“Onboarding was seamless. What could have been a painful supplier transition turned into a smooth, efficient rollout. We felt supported from day one.”

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