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Water companies that dump sewage should lose their licence, not get a fine they can afford

Environment ● National by RachelNotRachael · 🏷️ 1. Concerned Citizen · Fringe · 5 months ago
12

Thames Water discharged raw sewage into rivers for 3.6 million hours in 2023. They were fined a fraction of their revenue. The fine is not a deterrent. It is a business expense.

How this should work:

1. Every water company gets a sewage discharge limit per year
2. Exceed it once and you receive a formal warning
3. Exceed it again the following year and your operating licence is suspended
4. The company goes into public administration until standards are met
5. Directors face personal criminal liability for repeated breaches

Water is a natural monopoly. Customers cannot switch. The regulator has to actually regulate.

RachelNotRachael 🏠 Borough Councillor Fringe

☕ The Quietly Seething Party

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Discussion (11)

Sign in to join the discussion. Debate and humour are both very welcome.

Thames Water took on £72bn in debt while paying out £72bn in dividends. Borrowed money to pay shareholders while pipes rotted and sewage flowed. This isn't a regulatory failure, it's the privatisation model working exactly as designed.
6
Not defending Thames Water but those dividend figures are cumulative since 1989. Over 35 years that's roughly £2bn a year on £14bn revenue. The real scandal is the leveraged debt-loading by successive PE owners, particularly Macquarie. Possible to support private ownership AND want to make leveraged buyouts of essential monopolies illegal.
2
Thanks for actually saying it. Nobody likes being impolite about this stuff but the impoliteness is the only thing that has ever moved the needle on regulatory capture.

A company that pays its shareholders more than it invests in infrastructure isn't a company. It's an extraction event.
5
I live near the Severn. Used to swim in it as a kid. Last summer it was unsafe for bathing for most of the season. There are rivers in this country where water companies are legally pumping sewage into the same stretch with a bathing designation. The regulator knows. Everyone knows. Nobody does anything.
5
Disgrace, agreed. Suspending licences for natural monopolies creates its own problem though, who runs the water in the meantime? More practical: massive automatic fines scaling with discharge volume, plus personal criminal liability for directors. Make it hurt the people making the decisions, not the abstract entity.
4
The policy says "placed into public administration", that handles the "who runs it" question. It's about removing the profit incentive from companies that have shown they will sacrifice the environment for shareholder returns every single time. If fines worked we wouldn't be having this conversation.
3
Hard bit is finding a mechanism punitive enough to change behaviour without creating perverse incentives. Public administration of a complex utility isn't simple. The version I'd back: automatic escalating fines as % of revenue (harder to game than profit), plus personal director liability. Make polluting financially irrational.
2
this is the one thing genuinely everyone agrees on tbh. doesn't matter if ur left or right, nobody wants sewage in rivers. fine them properly. if they can't sort it, get someone else in. simple.
2
I've started just assuming any body of water in England has sewage in it. Saves time on the disappointment.
2
Safest swim in England right now is a bathtub, and even then check who your water company is first.
1
Privatised natural monopoly + captured regulator = where we are now. Ofwat has been asleep for two decades. The previous government knew, did nothing, the shareholders were donors. Public ownership has to be on the table, fines clearly aren't shifting behaviour.
2

Mock the policy. Not the person. Community principles →