'Complete disaster': Outrage as Thames Water reports huge spike in sewage spills… again

Thames Water has urged the industry regulator Ofwat to approve a hike to water bills – while revealing a 40% increase in sewage spills.

The UK’s biggest supplier reported 359 so-called ‘category one to three’ pollution incidents in the six months to 30 September. The total number of spills surged to 17,564 between January and September, compared to 12,428 a year previously.

Boss Chris Weston blamed record rainfall for the “unfortunate” figures – but critics have slammed such “unacceptable excuses”, urging the government to nationalise the ailing company.

• Calls to nationalise Thames Water as Brits face 40% increase in bills: ‘A con and a disgrace’
• Thames Water’s daily leakage is equivalent to running a hosepipe for 73 years

“The latest data on sewage spills proves that privatised Thames Water is a complete disaster,” Matthew Topham, lead campaigner at We Own It, said. “The company must be brought into public ownership now.”

Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron – the party’s environment spokesperson – described the increase as the “final straw”.

“The government must put this broken firm into special administration to give customers the fair deal they deserve. While pumping out raw sewage and letting pollution incidents spiral out of control, Thames Water have lined their pockets, mismanaged infrastructure and overseen mounting debts.”

What’s gone wrong at Thames Water?

Thames Water’s debts exceed £16bn, all accrued since it was privatised in 1989. In the past three and a half decades, it has borrowed to fund investments and pay dividends to shareholders, taking on further debt to finance interest payments.

Meanwhile, sewage pollution has soared. The company – which supplies a quarter of British households – discharged at least 72 billion litres of sewage into the River Thames between 2020 and November 2023.

The company want customers to foot the bill to fix this – earlier this year, they asked the regulator to let it hike bills by 53%, increasing household expenditure to an average of £667 a year by 2030. The increases, they claimed, would make the company ‘investible’.

It’s unlikely to get approval for this. Industry regulator Ofwat is mulling over increases of 21% (£19 a year), and a final decision is due on 19 December.

Even this lesser bill increase will be deeply unpopular, particularly as executives continue to cash out. Recently, Ofwat blocked Thames Water from using customer money to pay executive bonuses.

This week, Weston defended bosses getting £770,000 in bonuses. “I completely understand that there are customers out there who struggle with their bills,” he said – but added that the firm needed to offer “competitive” salaries to attract talent. Weston himself was awarded a bonus of £195,000 for his first three months at the company.

In addition to bill hikes, Thames Water is also seeking a £3bn emergency loan from its creditors. It has said its funds will be “exhausted” if it fails to secure court approval for the cash injection.

The court will rule on the financial lifeline on 17 December and 20 January.

Topham called on the government to “stop the £3bn bailout,” calling on environment secretary Steve Reed to “remove Thames Water’s licence and bring it into public ownership. The Treasury says its debt could be cut in half in that scenario and shareholders have already written off the company as worthless.”

“Publicly owned Thames Water can provide a model for a new way to run England’s water companies, with households, workers and environmental and river action groups holding the company to account and cleaning up our rivers.”

Lord Prem Sikka, a Labour peer and academic, urged the government to “let [Thames Water] go bust”.

“Serial offender, dumped sewage for decades, neglected investment, borrowed to pay dividends. Now [it] wants customers to bail it out. They will own nothing,” he posted on BlueSky. “Let it go bust. Nationalise at nominal cost.”

If the government took Thames Water into special administration – on the basis that it could no longer furnish its responsibilities to customers – We Own It argue that its debts could be written off.

However, nationalisation seems unlikely. Earlier this year, a Defra spokesperson said that “the government has no intention to nationalise water companies. It would cost tens of billions of pounds and take years to unpick the current ownership model, during which time the sector’s issues would only get worse.”

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