Provision of Regulatory Reporting Advice

Description

Development of Business Plan guidance, templates and definitions for collection of data from Scottish Water Lot 1: Engineering and asset management Development of guidance, data templates and accompanying definitions in several areas, including, but not limited to: (i) levels of service performance, covering customer service, water quality compliance and environmental compliance; (ii) business influences and base assumptions such as forecasts for inflation, growth in billed properties and customer volumes and interest costs; (iii) operating expenditure; (iv) the current asset inventory, focusing on the distribution of assets in each asset category by age profile; (v) asset replacement interventions, with reference to the asset inventory, providing an approach for measuring asset health consistently across the full asset base (e.g. using the age profile of the assets in each category as a proxy) to measure the impact of proposed replacement interventions using the age profile of the assets in each category as a proxy for targeting proposed replacement interventions; and (vi) enhancement and growth investment, removing the element of investment that relates to the replacement of any existing assets and setting out the outputs to be delivered from each proposed project, when those outputs will be delivered and at what cost. The contractor will need to assist WICS with developing the definition for enhancement and growth investment, versus asset replacement investment, which would then feed into the definitions for the updated regulatory accounting rules. Lot 2: Regulatory accounting and transfer pricing rules 1. Test WICS and Scottish Water’s thinking on key areas including on the definition of core and non-core activities, reflecting lessons from other regulated sectors and regulatory best practice. 2. Codify this thinking in refreshed regulatory accounting rules covering the regulatory financial statements that Scottish Water prepares for WICS (previous regulatory accounting rules can be found through the links in the table above). The refresh is expected to cover areas such as: - the definition of core and non-core activities; - the policies that determine whether items of expenditure are treated as operating or capital expenditure (i.e. capitalisation policies); - the definition of the different categories of capital expenditure, including asset replacement, enhancement and growth; and - recording all potential liabilities being stored up for future generations of customers, including any difference between the how much Scottish Water should be spending to replace assets each year on average (based on asset values and expected asset lives) and what it actually spends to replace assets in that year. 3. Review of the rules in place to underpin intra-company transactions or transactions with associate entities, including requirements for market testing and full cost recovery. 4. Updates to the Excel data templates for the regulatory accounts that Scottish Water reports to WICS each year.