South West Water’s Owner Has a New Senior Hire, Here’s His Job

The company that supplies water to most of Cornwall has a new senior figure deciding how billions of pounds get spent on the pipes, treatment works and pumping stations the region relies on every day.

A new role at the top

Ian Christie joined Pennon Group in May 2026 as its newly appointed Chief Asset Officer. Pennon owns South West Water, the company responsible for water and wastewater across Cornwall and Devon. The role is a new one, created to make sure the condition, performance and resilience of Pennon’s assets shape decisions on service delivery, environmental protection and long-term investment.

Ian joined from Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, where he was Managing Director for Water Services, Capital Delivery and Asset Planning. Originally from South Shields, he studied civil engineering before a career spanning consulting, construction and client-side leadership roles, including infrastructure projects around the world and civil engineering work across several UK water companies.

He says the job was too good to turn down. “What attracted me was the challenge. We’re seeing a step-change in investment across the sector, alongside rising expectations from customers, regulators and stakeholders. That creates a real responsibility to ensure we’re spending customer money in the right way by investing in the right solutions, in the right places, and delivering the greatest benefit for customers and the environment.”

A record £3.2 billion to spend

Pennon is currently delivering a record £3.2 billion investment programme between 2025 and 2030, covering improvements to water and wastewater services alongside environmental performance and resilience.

The scale of the company’s patch was part of the draw. “Pennon covers a large and varied geography, from Devon and Cornwall through to Bristol, Bournemouth and Sutton and East Surrey,” Ian says. “It’s a big geography with some big challenges.”

What the job actually involves

Infrastructure, in Ian’s terms, means everything from treatment works and pumping stations to the network of pipes moving drinking water and wastewater every day.

“Everything we do is through an asset operated by people,” he says. “How we treat water, how we treat wastewater, how we move water around our network and how we deliver services to customers all depends on infrastructure performing as it should.”

His brief is to pull all of that together. “My role is about bringing together everything we do with those assets, how we understand them, how we maintain them, how we plan for the future and how we invest in them. By creating a more joined-up approach, we can make better decisions and ultimately deliver better outcomes.”

Thinking decades ahead

With water companies under growing scrutiny over sewage, climate resilience and the state of their networks, Ian sees asset management only becoming more central, and that means hiring as well as building.

“If you look 5, 10 or even 25 years ahead, asset management will become even more important. The decisions we make today about investment, maintenance and renewal will shape the services we can provide in the future.”

“We’re already building the team and strengthening our capability. Pennon has a huge amount of talent across the organisation and we are reshaping that and supplementing it by bringing in some new key roles.”