PJM Economics works with clients across the water sector, including policy makers, regulators, all of the UK water companies, and various other bodies, helping to apply rigorous economic thinking and robust research to the practical challenges facing them.   This include a wide range of work to support water resources management planning, drainage and wastewater management planning, price review business planning, and river basin management planning.  PJM Economics contributes to the development of best practice methodologies in many of these areas, as well as providing robust research-based estimates that feed into the plans and help shape them.

Related experience

• Our work in the water sector has included:
• Development of best practice industry guidelines on best value water resources planning
• Development of industry methodology for valuing water and wastewater service levels for PR24 
• Over 30 stated preference willingness-to-pay (WTP) studies and a number of revealed preference and value transfer studies, all contributing service level valuations for PR19 and PR14 business plans.
• Triangulation of customer research from a variety of sources for PR19 business plans 
• Business plan customer acceptability research for several water companies
• Membership of a company’s customer challenge group
• Peer reviews of water company’s WTP research
• Reviews of the application of WTP numbers in cost-benefit appraisals and outcome delivery incentives 
• Cross-industry comparisons of PR19 and PR14 willingness-to-pay results
• A meta-analysis of PR14 willingness-to-pay results exploring the drivers of variation.
• A combined stated preference-revealed preference study for the Environment Agency to measure the economic value of improvements to inland fisheries across England.

Additionally, prior to founding PJM economics, Paul Metcalfe was one of the authors of the UKWIR 2011 guidelines on ‘Carrying Out Willingness to Pay Surveys’ and led the National Water Environment Benefits Survey research team in a study for DEFRA, which obtained values for the impacts of the Water Framework Directive for households in England and Wales.  Paul’s PhD was also focused on non-market valuation in the water sector.