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Inspire Leisure Receives £110,000 Refund Through Business Water Audit
Client – Inspire Leisure
Industry – Leisure & Recreation
Service Provided – Business Water Audit and Bill Recovery
The Challenge
Inspire Leisure approached us to conduct a business water audit, seeking clarity on their historical billing and confidence in the accuracy of their ongoing charges. With multiple sites and complex billing structures, they suspected there may have been historical overcharges but needed expert support to validate and resolve the issue.
""Delivering substantial refunds and ensuring accurate billing for our clients are core priorities for us. We're proud to have secured a £110,000 refund for Inspire Leisure and to support them in achieving long-term savings and billing accuracy.""The Water Audit Team
£110,000
Refund achieved
4 Sites
Audited
3 Year
Contracts
Case study
Inspire Leisure: £110,000 refund recovered after a multi-site water audit
Inspire Leisure had a hunch their water bills weren’t adding up across their four sites, but didn’t have the time or specialist knowledge to prove it. We ran a full audit covering historic invoices, on-site usage and supplier negotiations, and recovered £110,000.
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Home / Case studies / Inspire Leisure
Last updated August 2026
Why Inspire asked for an audit
Inspire Leisure run multiple sites with the kind of usage patterns that make water billing complicated. Pools, showers, irrigation, plant. Across four sites the team suspected the historic billing wasn’t fully accurate but didn’t have the bandwidth or the specialist eye to evidence it themselves.
The brief wasn’t to change supplier — they were inside their existing 3-year contracts. It was to find out whether the trust had been overpaying, and if so, to actually get the money back.
Delivering substantial refunds and ensuring accurate billing for our clients are core priorities for us. We’re proud to have secured a £110,000 refund for Inspire Leisure and to support them in achieving long-term savings and billing accuracy.
Water Audit Lead · The Business Water Shop
What we did
Pulled the historic invoice trail across all four sites
A full multi-year invoice review for each supply, lined up so anomalies between sites and across periods became visible. Discrepancies that look small on a single bill stand out clearly when laid alongside the rest.
Visited each site to verify actual usage
Pools, irrigation, washdown — leisure operations have water use patterns that don’t always match the assumptions retailers price against. We confirmed what was actually happening on site against what was being billed.
Pursued the suppliers through to refund
Once the overcharges were documented we worked through to refunds and ongoing rate corrections, rather than leaving the discrepancies on file.
What changed
£110,000 returned to the trust
Retrospective billing corrections on the audited supplies recovered £110,000 for Inspire Leisure. No supplier switch and no contract change required.
Ongoing cost reductions on the audited sites
Where rates were wrong they were corrected going forward as well as backwards. The savings continue across the remaining contract term.
Clarity on what the trust is actually paying for
Inspire now has documented evidence of what each site’s water bill should be, line by line. Future bills are easier to check against the baseline.
Common questions
Can a water audit be done while we’re still mid-contract with our supplier?
Yes. An audit checks whether the bills you’re receiving are accurate. That’s a different question to whether you can change supplier. Refunds and rate corrections can be recovered from your existing retailer without ending the contract.
Why do leisure sites tend to find more overcharges than other sectors?
Pools, showers, irrigation and plant create complex usage patterns that don’t match the standard assumptions retailers use to bill. Metered supplies can also be miscoded or misread, especially across multiple sites with different setups.
How big does a multi-site operation need to be for a water audit to be worth running?
There’s no fixed threshold. The relevant question is whether the historic invoice volume is large enough that even a small percentage of error becomes a meaningful refund. For leisure trusts with several sites, that’s almost always the case.
Is the audit risky if our bills turn out to be accurate?
No. We run audits on a no-find-no-fee basis. If your billing is correct, the only thing that’s changed is you have evidence it’s correct.
Could a similar audit work for our leisure trust, academy or multi-site organisation?
If you’ve got multiple supplies, complex usage, or you simply haven’t had your water bills audited recently, it’s usually worth running. We’d start with a look at what you’re currently paying and identify whether there’s likely to be anything worth investigating further.
More case studies
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14 water meters consolidated onto a single 36-month contract, with over £10,000 in forecast saving.
Could there be money sitting in your historic water bills?
A water audit costs nothing unless it finds something. For multi-site operations the chances of recovering money are usually high enough to make the check worth doing.
