JOHN ROBERTS is on his way to the loo when I walk up the stairs at United Utilities’ London office. “Oh hello,” he says after I apologise for being 20 minutes early. He shows me into the unmanned reception, stands behind the desk and signs me in. Then he offers to get me a coffee. Now, that’s what I call the personal touch.

Roberts, a 59-year-old Scouser who has headed United Utilities since 1999, is known for his people skills. Born to working-class parents in Wallasey, near Liverpool, and trained at the old Manchester and North Wales Electricity Board (Manweb), he is one of Britain’s longest-serving utility bosses who runs his 16,700 employees and £2.1 billion-turnover firm with the surest of touches.

Many now rate him as the northwest’s premier corporate leader, a position acknowledged by both a CBE and a CBI award last year. Seven days ago his company clinched its first top 10 position in Business In the Community’s annual Corporate Responsibility Index for FTSE firms. Roberts, it seems, is playing at the top of his game.

But recognition can be a double-edged sword. When he joined United Utilities, which distributes water and electricity in northwest England, the company was still recovering from a PR low. In 1997 its chief executive had left under a cloud after running off with the chairman’s secretary, and many outsiders were wondering just what kind of people skills were being practised at the Warrington-based utility.

Under Roberts, the company has taken a stealthier approach. It delivers its dividends as methodically as its water, and cleans up any mess without huge fuss — as it did with Carlisle’s flooding in the January storms. Its forays into new business areas outside the highly regulated water and electricity sectors have yet to end in calamity, and its results in June should contain few surprises.

“It’s a funny industry,” grins Roberts. “If we get no recognition, then we must be doing a good job.” Then he offers me another drink. “Bottled water or Thames?” Roberts, who trained as both an engineer and an accountant, is adept at putting people at ease. It starts with his unfusty demeanour and plain-spoken interest in others, and goes right through to his lived-in looks. Compact but rumpled, with thinning hair and basset-hound face, he smiles with one eye widened as if he has just spotted the next joke hopping over the horizon.

The chumminess has a drawback: many wonder if he is ruthless enough to be an effective FTSE 100 boss. But his financial results are spotless, and he is famously good at winning over critical audiences — an advantage when you are hemmed in by regulators always probing prices and profits.

He has recently negotiated his second electricity-distribution and water-price review with regulators, and persuaded the City to back a £1 billion rights issue to fund some of the efficiencies demanded by the review. The key, say those who know him, is that Roberts wears his expertise lightly, but effectively.

“John has delivered and survived where the vast majority of his peers haven’t,” says David Jefferies, chairman of Costain and an old electricity industry colleague. “He is simply one of those who believes a good deal is where everyone leaves the table with something. That’s how business should be.”

Sitting in shirtsleeves in his glass-walled sanctum at United Utilities’ London outpost near Bond Street, Roberts plays down the praise. Every utility boss, he explains, faces a core dilemma. Utilities should be low-risk, low-growth businesses. But customers want lower prices, regulators want more investment, and shareholders, while they like the security of low risk, want expansion.

“So there is always the temptation to go and get more,” he says. “We have tried to put together a strategy that sticks to what we do well: managing a big asset base — £30 billion-worth of assets — and a big customer base: 3m people. You need to have the systems to deal with large numbers, and we have tried to build businesses around that expertise.”

So United Utilities now operates licensed water, waste-water and electricity distribution networks in northwest England, while also providing contract services to Welsh Water and construction know-how to Scottish Water. It sold its energy retail arm in 2000 — too small, says Roberts — and pushed into a non-regulated sector, “business process outsourcing”.

There it competes with giants like Capita. It has a client list that includes Marks & Spencer and Westminster city council, and a turnover close to £400m.