Rivers at Risk: Uncovering the Depths of Water Industry Failure
Revolving doors, debt-ridden companies and no end to the sewage crisis: our water industry is broken and customers are paying the price
It won’t have escaped your notice that we have had a periods of exceptionally heavy rainfall in the past few weeks. It’s autumn. That’s inevitable. What shouldn’t be inevitable is the fact that with every wet spell sewage gets dumped into the River Mole, which runs through our constituency.
It happened on the 19 October - when four hours’ worth of sewage was pumped out of overflow sites at Esher and Cobham - and again on 20 October - when another five hours’ worth was pumped from the Esher site, located on the Mole at Lower Green. Then, with the arrival of Storm Ciaran, it happened again: nearly 100 hours continuously at both Esher and Cobham. (You can check the current status of the overflows for yourself using this interactive map.) In 2022, 3000 hours of raw sewage was pumped into the Mole by Thames Water.
The sewage crisis is a national failure: a failure of government, leadership, accountability and regulation. It’s a symptom of the lack of care that runs through all of the Conservative government’s decisions in the past 13 years:
lack of care for the consequences of austerity and funding cuts to the agencies that maintain our vital infrastructure and protect the public;
lack of care for the principles of good governance and regulatory oversight to the extent that water companies mark their own homework, break the law and lie with impunity aided and abetted, as exposed by the Liberal Democrats, by a revolving door of senior staff moving between the industry and the regulators; and
lack of care for the motives of private sector industries that prioritise eye-watering profit and shareholder dividends above their duty to their customers.
There are parallels with the policy and funding decisions that have led to the decline of our railways, as I wrote about in my recent blog on South Western Railways. More galling still is that a significant chunk of the profits being made by both SWR and Thames Water are going to international investors: the Chinese-owned MTR owns 30% of SWR; sizeable stakes in Thames Water are owned by the Abu Dhabi Investment authority, the China Investment Corporation and two Canadian public sector funds. (Source: here and here)
Then there is the lack of care for the environmental costs of this institutional and regulatory neglect.
Esher and Walton’s Conservative MP is emblematic of this disregard: back in April, he couldn’t even be bothered to turn up to Parliament for a vote that would have stopped raw sewage
Access to clean, affordable water is a basic right. Yet water companies have failed to stop sewage being dumped into our rivers, neglected to maintain their infrastructure to prevent water leaking away, piled up unmanageable debt (in Thames Water’s case, to the tune of £14bn, with the company on the brink of collapse) and are now proposing that customers pay the price of their mismanagement. Under the plans submitted to Ofwat, Thames Water’s customers will face an increase in annual bills from 2025 of £175, from £435 to £611 a year.
Enough is enough. We desperately need a change of Government in order to get to grips with the failures that are endemic across our public utilities, to make them work properly for customers again and to bring back proper regulatory oversight and accountability. The Liberal Democrats are committed to cleaning up our waterways and holding water companies to account, including:
Banning sewage discharges in protected waters
Banning water company executives being paid multi-million pound bonuses.
Scrapping Ofwat and replacing it with a regulator with real teeth.
Stopping the revolving door of senior staff moving between the regulator and water companies.
We need a change: I’m determined to fight for a better deal on public services, including water, for Esher and Walton’s households and to clean up our local rivers and protect them for future generations.