The disaster of water privatisation is never ending. It turns out, water companies have overseen a large increase in serious sewage pollution incidents. They’re at a ten year high, according to data that Surfers Against Sewage obtained. There were 2,487 incidents in 2024, which is over twice the limit that the Environment Agency (EA) set.
This is separate to the total number of sewage spills, which stood at 3.614 million hours of spillages into our lakes, rivers and seas in 2024.
The EA set a target that water companies must collectively deliver a 40% reduction in pollution incidents compared with 2016. But instead there was a 31% increase.
“Staggering” sewage pollution shows Surfers Against Sewage
Giles Bristow, the chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage, said:
The numbers are staggering: record hours of sewage discharges, huge bill increases, thousands of people becoming ill and yet still the industry has the gall to still pay out billions of bill-payer money to shareholders. Things could not be clearer: this broken system needs urgent and radical reform.
Since privatisation, water companies have paid out £78bn in dividends. That’s money that could’ve been invested in infrastructure to improve the sewage system through increasing capacity and dealing with sewage and rainwater separately. Meanwhile, every year we are charged £5bn more because of the private ownership model, according to research from the University of Greenwich.
Bristow continued:
We can change things if we change the way our system is run. Across the globe, the norm is to manage water at a local level, rather than the 100% private ownership model in place in England that has proved catastrophic for the environment and public health.
England and Wales are the only countries to have privatised the actual water infrastructure, rather than some other countries that only contract private companies to manage it. That said, it’s unclear why you can’t pay people to do that in-house.
Privatised water delivers unclean environment
There is a correlation between public ownership of water systems and a cleaner environment. Countries with water in 100% public ownership like Cyprus, Austria, and Malta have above 95% excellent water in bathing sites. By contrast, the UK’s privatised system harbours an average of 66.3% excellent water, putting us near the bottom of our European counterparts.
And over in Scotland, publicly owned water has overseen proportionately five times more rivers in good condition compared to England with its huge sewage problem.
Under public ownership, it’s cheaper to invest in infrastructure because the government has the entire nation’s tax bill as its security. It can also invest through quantitative easing. Public ownership also prioritises social good over private profit. So the water utilities are less likely to cut corners in order to protect short-term shareholder gains.
Referring to the best performing publicly owned water companies, water expert and winner of the Stockholm Water Prize Professor Asit Biswas said:
Not a single privatised water utility comes even close to their performance
The Glasgow University academic also said:
Water supply is not rocket science. We have known what to do for decades. Sadly, all the British water utilities fall well short of good practices
Biswas does point out that public ownership is not a silver bullet. There are still publicly owned water companies that mismanage sewage and perform badly. But the bottom line that it’s cheaper to own water, something we literally need to survive, than it is to rent it from rich people, is clear.
Featured image via the Canary
