UK Utility Reporter pulls live data from several official feeds alongside reports submitted by the public. This article explains what data is available, which sectors are missing, and why the gap exists.
The following official feeds are integrated and updated automatically — no manual input required.
The following sectors were investigated. In each case, the data either doesn't exist publicly, lacks coordinates, or is too stale to be useful.
Every major water company in England and Wales — Thames Water, Anglian, Severn Trent, Yorkshire, United Utilities, Wessex, Southern, Northumbrian, and Welsh Water — has an incident map on their website. None of them publish that data as a structured API.
The only widely available water data is storm overflow monitoring (discharge events from Combined Sewer Overflows), which Defra mandated in 2023 following public pressure about river pollution. This is environmental transparency data, not supply interruption data.
Yorkshire Water had a live incidents feed on Data Mill North — it returned 404 when tested in June 2026.
The four gas distribution network operators — Cadent (the largest, covering the North West, East Midlands, West Midlands and North London), SGN (Scotland and South East England), Wales & West Utilities, and Northern Gas Networks — all have incident pages, but none publish structured data.
Cadent operates an OpenDataSoft portal but it contains no incident data. Gas faults are typically emergency situations (escapes, pressure loss) handled by rapid engineer response rather than public tracking, which partly explains the different transparency posture.
National Grid Electricity Distribution (formerly Western Power Distribution) publishes a live faults dataset on their Connected Data portal. However, as of June 2026, all records are 4+ days stale — their data pipeline appears broken. NGED covers the Midlands, South West England and Wales.
SP Energy Networks (Scotland and Merseyside & North Wales) publishes a feed via OpenDataSoft but omits coordinates — only postcode sector is included, which isn't precise enough for map pins without a separate geocoding step.
Electricity North West (North West England) requires registration to access their OpenDataSoft portal. NIE Networks (Northern Ireland) has an OpenDataSoft feed but no coordinates in the schema.
The short answer is Ofgem's RIIO price controls. Since the RIIO-ED1 framework (2015–2023), Distribution Network Operators have been required to meet strict reliability targets and publish performance data as a condition of their licences. Real-time fault publication emerged from that transparency obligation — it's not voluntary, it's a regulated expectation.
Water and gas operate under different frameworks:
The Environment Agency flood warnings are an interesting exception — they've been publicly accessible for over a decade, driven by the clear public safety case for flood intelligence. The Met Office warning RSS feed has been free and open even longer.
Electricity DNOs followed largely because of regulatory pressure. For water and gas, that pressure is building — but the infrastructure and APIs don't exist yet.
For sectors without official data, the public map relies entirely on reports submitted by people on the ground. When someone reports a burst water main or a gas supply interruption, that pin goes live immediately — often before the utility company has updated their own systems.
This crowd-sourced layer is genuinely complementary to official feeds, not a substitute. An official electricity fault feed tells you where the DNO knows about a problem; a public report tells you where someone is experiencing one. The two together give a more complete picture.
Utility companies registered on the platform see incoming reports in their private dashboard and can acknowledge, update, and resolve them. If you work for a water or gas company and want to connect, the portal is open.
Ofwat's PR24 price control and the government's Water Industry Act reform proposals both include stronger transparency requirements. It's plausible that water companies will be required to publish supply interruption data in a structured format within the next 2–3 years — similar to what electricity DNOs do today.
For gas, the picture is less clear. The gas distribution network is being wound down in the long term as the UK transitions away from gas for heating, which may reduce investment in open data infrastructure.
The electricity coverage will improve as NGED fixes their data pipeline and as SP Energy Networks potentially adds coordinate data to their feed. NIE Networks (Northern Ireland) and ENW (North West England) could be added if they open up their feeds.
If you work in data at a water or gas company and want to explore publishing a live feed — or if you're building something that uses our public API — get in touch.