The council search gets all the attention. It's the one with the quirks, the portals, the prior-appointment councils, the rejection over a missing field.
The drainage and water search is quieter. It sits to one side of the main workflow, gets placed through a different channel, and comes back from a different source. And precisely because it's separate, it's where a surprising amount of time leaks out of a search firm without anyone noticing.
Here's how the CON29DW actually works, who provides it, and why the duplicate data entry it usually involves is more expensive than it looks.
What is the CON29DW drainage and water search?
The CON29DW is the Law Society's standard residential Drainage and Water Enquiry. It confirms whether a property is connected to the public water mains and foul sewer, shows where public sewers and drains run, and sets out who's responsible for maintenance and billing. It's a separate search from the council CON29 and LLC1.
The questions it answers matter to a buyer. Is the property on mains drainage or a private system? Does a public sewer run under the building or garden, which could affect future extensions? Who bills for water, and is the supply metered? None of that lives with the council. It lives with the water companies.
The standard residential form is the CON29DW Drainage and Water Enquiry, and it's the version most conveyancers expect to see on a residential purchase.
Who provides drainage and water searches?
The data originates with the regional water and sewerage companies — the bodies that actually hold the sewer maps and supply records. The reports themselves are produced and resold by providers, with aggregators distributing them, so you rarely deal with a water company directly.
This is the part that confuses people coming into the work. There isn't one national drainage search. There's a layer of providers sitting on top of the regional water companies, each producing the CON29DW from the underlying data.
The main names you'll meet:
| Provider | Linked to | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Geodesys | Anglian Water group | Produces the residential CON29DW; see Geodesys |
| Severn Trent Searches | Severn Trent Water | Drainage and water reports for its supply region |
| Northumbrian Water Property Solutions | Northumbrian Water | Drainage and water reports for its supply region |
| Landmark | Aggregator | Distributes drainage and water searches across regions |
The practical upshot: you don't have to know which water company covers which postcode and chase each one separately. An aggregator like Landmark lets you place the drainage order in one place and routes it to the right source behind the scenes.
Why is the drainage search a separate workstream?
Because it draws on a different data source and comes through a different channel from the council search, the drainage enquiry runs as its own parallel task. The council answers planning, highways and land charges. The water and sewerage companies answer drainage. Two searches, two sources, two return times.
That separation is fine in principle. The problem is operational. In most firms the council request lives in one place — a spreadsheet, an inbox, a back-office system — and the drainage search lives somewhere else entirely, usually a provider portal you log into by hand.
So a single order splits into two streams that don't talk to each other. You track the council response in one view and the drainage response in another. When a solicitor asks where their search is, someone has to check two systems to answer one question.
It works. It just costs more attention than it should.
Where does the drainage search waste time in a search firm?
The duplicate data entry. You've already captured the address and confirmed the UPRN for the council request. Then you open a separate provider portal and type the same details in again — address, client reference, property type — for the drainage order. The information already exists in your system; you're just re-keying it into someone else's.
On one order it's ninety seconds. Nobody's going to build a business case around ninety seconds. But the time lost inside your firm is invisible in a way the council wait never is.
The council wait is somebody else's fault and everybody can see it. The duplicate entry is your own process, repeated quietly on every order, and it never shows up as a problem because no single instance is large. Multiply ninety seconds by every search you place in a week, then by every week. That's a person's afternoon, gone, on copying data from one screen to another.
There's a second cost that's easy to miss: every manual re-key is a chance to fat-finger a postcode or pick the wrong property type, which means a drainage report that has to be re-ordered. Where firms lose time is rarely the dramatic stuff. It's the small repeated steps nobody questions.
How does integrated provider placement fix it?
Integrated placement means the drainage order goes out from the same system that holds the rest of the order, using data you've already captured, without a second portal login. No re-typing, no switching screens, no separate tracking view. The drainage response comes back into the same place as everything else.
In Valio, the drainage and environmental searches are placed via Landmark and Martello directly from the order. The address and UPRN you confirmed for the council request carry straight through to the drainage placement. You don't open another portal and you don't type anything twice.
The point isn't that any one portal is bad. The providers do their job well. It's that the drainage search shouldn't be a separate manual errand bolted onto an order that already exists in your system. When it's part of the same flow, the whole order, council search and drainage search together, moves as one thing with one status and one view.
"The drainage search is the one people forget to count. They'll tell you the council is slow, and they're right. But ask them how long they spend re-typing the same address into a provider portal every day and you get a blank look. That time's real. It just never had a name. When it's built into the order instead of bolted on the side, you get the afternoon back."
— Valerie Bennett, Personal Search Veteran · June 2026
What good looks like
A well-run firm treats the drainage search as part of the order, not a side task. The address is captured once. It flows to the council request and to the drainage placement without anyone re-keying it. Both responses land in the same view, with the same status, so one question gets one answer.
That's not a grand transformation. It's just refusing to do the same small job by hand, over and over, on every order that comes through the door.
If you want the bigger picture of how the back office fits together, start with running a personal search business. If you want to see the drainage and environmental placement working inside the order flow, the product features page shows it.
See how it works → · Running a personal search business → · Where firms lose time → · What is an environmental search? →