Severn Trent boss paid £3.3m in one year just as sewage spills went up

Severn Trent boss Liv Garfield received a staggering total pay package last year after overseeing a rise in sewage spills into our environment. Her salary of £830,000, plus an additional £2.3m in bonuses and benefits, comes from higher consumer bills. It’s an instance of the top slicing that’s become rampant after Margaret Thatcher privatised our water assets in 1989.

Severn Trent: pollute the river bank, then laugh all the way to the actual bank

NHS chief executives get paid around £200,000 per year (currently without bonuses, with the government floating those of 10%), but this demonstrates that water bosses’ pay – like Garfield’s at Severn Trent – takes the piss on a whole new level.

Her bonus was a 42% increase on the year before, despite 62,085 sewage spills (or 454,155 hours of overflows) at Severn Trent’s plants in 2024. She has now creamed around £29m from people who need water since she became CEO in 2014.

Severn Trent under Garfield was also responsible for 274 pollution incidents last year – another increase. On top of that, the company was fined £2m for spilling 260m litres of sewage into the River Trent.

In response, the water boss was in complete denial, claiming Severn Trent has:

made massive progress on river quality

And chairman Christine Hodgson said in the company’s annual report:

Restoration of trust in our sector remains a significant challenge but it is a challenge we are passionate about meeting successfully. The sector as a whole must respond to this by improving performance … to rebuild trust. I am proud of the role Severn Trent is playing in forging a path to meet these expectations – through setting bold ambitions, accelerating investment, with the support of our shareholders, and embodying the social purpose we so passionately believe in.

In comparison to public ownership, shareholders do not support the water industry, they drain dividends from it, increasing our bills. Investment from the private sector is also more expensive because the sale of government bonds has half the interest rate of private borrowing.

Additional surcharge fees

Water companies are also now going even further in their profiteering. They are planning to increase prices in the summer with surcharge fees. And they are demanding that customers ration water.

The thing is, water companies sold off 35 reservoirs in just five years, making £26 million from flogging what were public assets. Now they are blaming customers and using it as an excuse to make more cash.

If Severn Trent’s leadership really “passionately” believed in the “social purpose” of water, they would hand the company back into public ownership.

Featured image via the Canary