Thames Water: public ownership is long overdue

HubMP201

APRIL 1, 2025

By Murad Qureshi

Thames Water bills will go up this month by 31%. The average annual bill will increase from £488 to £639.

Yet, as the Express revealed recently, “Over a third of customers’ bills for water in England and Wales are not used for water and sewerage services. An average of 35% of customer bills in 2023-2024 was taken out to pay for the interest on water companies’ debt piles and to pay dividends to the shareholders.”

Thames Water currently has a debt mountain of £20 bn – there is a debt of £60 bn across the industry. Meanwhile £80 bn has been paid out in dividends over the last 35 years since privatisation.

Last month, it was revealed that a record 3.6m hours of sewage was dumped in UK waters in 2024. Friends of the Earth’s senior sustainability analyst, Paul De Zylva, commented: “Water customers – who are about to be hit with even higher water bills – will wonder what happened to their money which should have been used to prevent pollution long before now. We need urgent, bold action by the government, not more anti-regulation rhetoric from ministers, to hold these and other serial polluters to account.”

Thames Water alone pumped human waste into the Greater London area of the River Thames for a staggering 1,914 hours in the first eighty days of 2024 alone. Over 90% of samples taken from the river revealed a significant presence of coliform bacteria, with oxygen levels on occasion being so low as to threaten aquatic life.

In July 2023, Thames Water was fined £3.33m after millions of litres of raw sewage flooded two rivers near Gatwick. The untreated effluent killed several thousand fish. The presiding judge said the company deliberately misled the Environment Agency during its investigation.

In November of that year, the Guardianreported that Thames Water had pumped at least 72bn litres of sewage into the River Thames since 2020. The company was fined a total of £35.7m between 2017 and 2023 for pollution incidents – fines that are paid for by higher bills for consumers. A failure to  invest in new treatment works is the key reason the company fails to meet its legal targets. Last year London Mayor Sadiq Khan called on the company’s Chief executive to “get a grip of the situation.”

My CLP, Queens Park and Maida Vale, recently passed a resolution expressing our deep concerns about the recent proposed hikes in Thames Water charges for residents in our constituency. We noted that during a cost of living crisis, Thames Water has gone to court for a loan of £3 billion when it already has £17 billion debt, and wants to increase our water bills to fund their dividends to shareholders where a third of customer bills will cover interest payments alone.

We noted that globally full privatisation of water supply and sanitation is an exception today, being limited to England, Chile and some cities in the United States. Public ownership is popular with 82% of the UK population, more popular than that of our railways, which have already been partly brought back into public ownership by the Labour government.

Thames Water’s record in London has been pretty awful, with investments like desalination plants of £500 million hardly being used since they were built. In particular in W9, where even after Flip kiosks at several million pounds’ cost were installed, we still had flash floods in 2021 that they could not cope with at all.  Meanwhile, road works for water leaks are a major cause of road closures in Central London, with up to 3,000 holes dug annually in the City of Westminster alone!

We should not permit the socialization of their losses, while the profits are privatised again in the future. On this basis, the customer is bailing out the privatised water industry for the work they failed to do with the money we gave them in the first place.

We want our elected members to make the case for government to explore national ownership of Thames Water, similar to the mutualisation of water facilities by local regional government in Wales. The spectacle of ​​Thames Water seeking permission from the Competition and Markets Authority to allow it to increase water bills by 59% over five years is quite incredible. I trust the CMA does not forget their mission to make markets work in the interests of consumers, ensuring fair competition and consumer protection.

Murad Qureshi was a member of the London Assembly from 2004 to 2016 and from 2020 to 2021. He blogs at http://www.muradqureshi.com/

Image: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/tag/privatisation/ Creator: rawpixel.com / U.S. Department of Agriculture (Source) | Credit: rawpixel.com / U.S. Department of Agriculture. Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal CC0 1.0 Deed

Thames Water picks US investment firm KKR as ‘preferred partner’


A tanker from Thames Water

Morning Star | The People’s Daily
Tuesday, April 1, 2025

THAMES WATER has picked US investment firm KKR as its “preferred partner” in a bid to fight off renationalisation.

The privatised utility, which recently went through court proceedings to secure a £3 billion bailout, is hoping to finalise the terms of a possible deal with KKR in the second quarter of this year and aims to complete it in the second half of 2025.

The US private equity firm is understood to have lodged a £4bn equity bid in return for a majority stake.

We Own It founder Cat Hobbs said: “If KKR secure a £4bn stake in Thames Water, this will do nothing to change the picture.

“They will still be drowning in over £16bn of debt, still trying to dodge environmental fines and will still prioritise shareholders over bill-payers and the environment

“The government has ducked the issue for too long — special administration to slash the rotten debt, then full public ownership, is the only way to reverse this catastrophe.”

Thames Water said there was still “no certainty” over a deal, adding that “certain senior creditors continue to progress in parallel alternative transaction structures to seek to recapitalise the business.”