Independent Director — Audit, Conduct and Renewal (Water and Environment)

An independent voice on what directors are told

In water and environmental services, the decisions a board takes have very long tails. A treatment upgrade deferred, a maintenance programme reprioritised or a service risk accepted can surface years later, long after the paper that justified it has been forgotten. The quality of what directors are told matters accordingly. The Independent Director's task is to make that evidence something directors can depend on.

The seat is oversight. The director challenges, tests and oversees; management runs the business.

The reach of an independent director here

The director helps agree which decisions local leadership keeps, and sets the standard of evidence the board uses to oversee investment, capacity and control. They oversee the review of inherited commitments and challenge any that would leave cost or risk with nobody to answer for it. Investment cases are tested for uptake, operating dependency and downside before approval. The director also oversees how management is organised and how matters rise, and helps the Group Chief Executive Officer and operating leaders work through conflicts.

In a member-owned organisation, independence has a particular value. Directors drawn from the membership bring closeness to the service; an independent director brings distance from it, and the willingness to ask why a familiar number should be believed.

The evidence standard, built and tested over the year

The first ninety days should agree with management the evidence directors need on treatment and service risk, so both sides know what a good paper looks like. Around month nine board and committee papers should be tested against that standard, with gaps in operating evidence challenged and given an owner. By month 12 the strengthened evidence base should be reviewed by the board and written into its annual evaluation, so the standard survives changes of director.

A director who can tell information from evidence

Board or executive service in organisations of $595 million or more of revenue, with 3,200 people and three countries as a minimum, is the baseline, together with experience of regulatory remediation, joint venture and professionalisation. Governance ethics at level 4 is the core requirement; risk judgement, entity governance and skill with the board and its stakeholders, all at level 3, make it practical.

Your understanding of water and environmental services rests on decisions you carried yourself, one of them halting a poorly backed commitment before it did harm. You can point to a popular commitment you ended and the evidence that justified it. You can tell an exception a service area truly needs from a difference that has survived only because nobody challenged it. Where the evidence is incomplete, you say so and still offer a view.

Four stages, one standard of evidence

Week 1 brings a private video conversation with the Board Chair. By week 3 you are with the Risk Committee Chair, looking hard at treatment and service risk evidence. In week 5 you meet in person the executives who lead each function, the authors of much of what the board reads, and in week 7 the full board. Four working days is the outside limit for our feedback, in writing, after each stage.