WATER INDUSTRY RICH LIST REVEALED:  BOSSES PAID £278M IN 11 YEARS AS SECTOR FACES OVERHAUL.   Fat cat water company bosses have earned £278m over more than a decade, as hosepipe bans multiply and an independent commission has today called for an overhaul of the privatised industry. Executive pay figures obtained by the Daily Mail

Water companies are wasting five times more water through leaky pipes than even a nationwide hosepipe ban could save, environmental campaigners say. Research by Greenpeace UK found that 2.87bn litres of water a day seep from leaky pipes in England and Wales. That is enough to fill 1,150 Olympic-sized swimming pools and amounts to a fifth of

Guardian piece   Severn Trent has doubled the size of a long-term reward scheme for its new chief executive to as much as £3.1m and he could receive significantly more than his predecessor, despite anger over water bosses’ pay. The FTSE 100 water company said its long-term incentive plan (LTIP) would increase from 200% of new

The public has paid almost £200bn to the shareholders who own key British industries since they were privatised, research reveals. The transfer of tens of billions of pounds to the owners of the privatised water, rail, bus, energy and mail services comes as families face soaring bills, polluted rivers and seas, and expensive and unreliable

The privatised water industry is rubbing its hands with glee, because reservoirs appear as assets on their books, and therefore increase the value of the companies. It might seem strange that, on an island renowned for its drizzle, we should find ourselves hit once again by water shortages, but this should not really come as

Is the UK’s infrastructure ready for climate change, with periods of dry weather becoming more common as a result of the climate crisis? No new reservoir has been built in the UK since 1992, shortly after water companies were privatised. While there are some plans to build new reservoirs these are not expected to be

Only 1% of water companies’ actions to improve environmental performance, such as improving sewer overflows, have been inspected by the Environment Agency, the authors of the NAO report said. They also found there was no regulator responsible for proactively inspecting wastewater assets to prevent further environmental harm.

The average bill will go up 36% but how much extra billpayers will be charged depends on what part of England or Wales you live in, and which water company supplies you. The sums are below what the firms had requested but not far off. In 2023 there were over 582,000 discharges of untreated sewage into UK rivers, totalling