Severn Trent sent taxi drivers to film water leaks instead of dispatching engineers

Severn Trent, the Coventry-based water company serving an area from the Peak District to Gloucestershire, was hunting for new, more efficient ways to find and fix leaks. One of its trials used an unusual workforce: Uber and taxi drivers.

Over a series of two-week trials, the drivers were sent to look at about 50 small leaks, streaming images to engineers back at base. The engineers could then quickly assess the correct response and dispatch the most appropriate team to each job.

The point was division of labor: engineers at the water company say they want to spend more time fixing leaks rather than simply assessing them, and a driver with a camera is a far cheaper pair of eyes than a specialist van roll-out.

Drivers are already on the road all day, so adding a leak stop costs a fraction of a technician visit.

Video triage from base turns one engineer's judgment into many correct dispatches per hour.

Ofwat's 15%-by-2025 leakage challenge made finding cheaper assessment tools a regulatory priority.

Assessment is the hidden cost in field service: if someone already driving past can stream the diagnosis, your specialists can spend their hours fixing instead of looking.

The GMB union objected that using taxi drivers had "huge safety implications", arguing water engineers are highly trained specialists who can spot contamination risks that most taxi drivers cannot. Severn Trent said it was reviewing all the trial results to see the best way to free engineers' time, while Ofwat said it expected all companies to consider whether they were using efficient and effective tools and resources.