Water failure now top threat to UK – we should be worried

After decades of under-investment by greedy private water companies, the failure of the UK’s water supply is now the top threat to the UK, alongside a new pandemic.

Norwich MP, Clive Lewis, pointed out the news, which he said should “keep you awake at night”.

So! “The @UKLabour govt’s National Risk Register now ranks losing our drinking water alongside a PANDEMIC as one of the two biggest threats facing the country”
AND @andyburnham @EmmaforWycombe still insist that the private (and bankrupt ) Water Companies are the only solution https://t.co/gqWF1ZyiP7

— Allan Williams (@allanwales2) July 17, 2026

Lewis is right. The 2026 National Risk Register report shows the likelihood of “catastrophic” water failure is between 5% and 25% — that means it’s likely to happen in the next 4-20 years.

‘Water is life’ yet risk of loss rockets

Yet the 2025 register rated the danger of failure “minor” and the likelihood at one in 100 or less (see page 120).

As Lewis explained, this soaring danger is driven by privatisation and corporate greed of water companies that pollute wildly while preferring to syphon away cash rather than fix water networks:

The govt’s National Risk Register now ranks losing our drinking water alongside a PANDEMIC as one of the two biggest threats facing the country

This year, in the right-hand document: The chances of “Catastrophic impact” on our drinking water supplies – up to a one in four chance.

Last year, same document (on the left) rated it a minor risk. Bottom of the chart.

So what changed? Nothing changed!

Water is still in private hands and depute the Water Special Measures Act deteriorating rapidly.

This is where 36 years of privatised water has brought us.

Tens of billions handed to shareholders. Over £60 billion of debt racked up on water assets that should belong to al of us.

Leaking pipes. No new major reservoirs. Sewage in our rivers, on our beaches, in our sea.

They didn’t invest. They extracted. And now the state’s own risk experts are telling us the tap water could go.

And the regulators? They watched. Fines for pollution became a business expense. Thames Water’s creditors are now asking for their pollution fines to be written off. You couldn’t make this stuff up!!!!

So let’s cut the crap about ‘tougher control’ of water companies. We’ve tried that for 36 years. It ended with drinking water on the national risk register next to a pandemic. You can’t regulate a cash machine into caring about you.

There’s one answer. Bring water back into mutualised public ownership. Run for people, not profit. Answerable to bill payers, not bondholders. Every single pound going back into the pipes and reservoirs we should have built decades ago.

Water is life. And yet we’ve watched it turned it into a payday.

Time to take it back.

‘Public control’?

Lewis didn’t mention new incoming prime minister Andy Burnham by name. But he clearly had Burnham and those around him in mind when he called talk of “tougher control” “crap”.

Burnham has refused to say water companies must be renationalised. Instead, he uses vague terms like “public control” that leave water in private hands with loose public oversight. The water industry has had public oversight for years via Ofwat, yet has regarded penalties for pollution and supply failures as just the cost of making fat profits.

Burnham initially said that the appalling Thames Water should be privatised. However, he and his advisers are now quailing at the threat from investors to sue if he tries. No. 10 is now ‘re-assessing‘ whether renationalisation is too “complicated and expensive”, rather than use Starmer’s approach of making laws to negate opposition for a good purpose for once.

National security

This is, of course, just so much Blairite bollocks. The government can always find billions of pounds for weapons and war. Meanwhile, Israel and its crimes can be protected by changes to laws. What could be a bigger threat to our national security than the failure of our water supply?

Pushing through the renationalisation of strategic sectors might come with a price tag if leaders lack the political will to just legislate to take them back, and let investors console themselves on the piles of cash they’ve sucked out up to now.

But the costs will be nothing compared to the cost of continued profit extraction by privateers and of the ensuing catastrophic collapse of those industries. Collapse that is now all but certain in the case of the water supply — the water supply — unless Burnham finds a spine and some principles, and sacks his re-assembled Blairite and Israel-first advisers.

Advisers that include the CEO of a firm that lobbies for the private water industry, by the way.

Featured image via Getty Images/ BBC