Water companies paid shareholders £377 for every hour they pumped sewage into seas, study finds

England’s privatised water and sewage companies paid out around £377 to shareholders for each hour they polluted last year, new research shows.

The shocking figures show that it still “pays to pollute”, campaign group We Own It have claimed.  

The UK’s 19th century plumbing infrastructure is not equipped to deal with a growing population, so the Environmental Agency allows water companies to release overflow after heavy rains. This means that the country’s waterways and seas are regularly swamped with excrement.

But the money that should be invested back into the system is funnelled into shareholder pockets, We Own It analysis suggests.

Shareholders received over £1.35bn in dividends in 2022/23 as their companies released sewage for more than 3.5 million hours last year.

 “No one else in Europe runs water like England,” said Matthew Topham, lead campaigner at We Own It. “Today’s figures are a clear reminder of why: under privatisation, you profit from pollution.”

“Privatisation is often said to have led to investment. Sadly, that’s just not true. All the cash invested has come from our bills.”

Severn Trent had the worst ratio of the English companies analysed. It released sewage for 440,446 hours last year, and paid shareholders £428m in dividends. This means it paid out £972 per hour of pollution.

They were followed by United Utilities (£692 per hour of pollution), Anglian water (£619), Northumbrian water (£396), Thames Water (£230), Wessex Water (£188), Yorkshire Water (£121), and South West Water (£23).

The only company without a comparable figure is Southern Water, which was forced into a dividend ban after a credit rating agency Fitch downgraded its credit worthy status in 2023.

Southern Water released sewage for 317,285 hours in 2023 and has paid out £2.3bn in dividends since privatisation, equivalent to £213 per hour if extrapolated across the whole privatisation period.

We Own It has launched an interactive tool to allow the public to visualise how much companies “profit from pollution” in their area.

Only re-nationalisation can fix the broken system, said Topham.

“The regulators had 35 years to get private companies working in the public’s interests. It hasn’t happened and the reality is it can’t. Regulators have a duty to shareholders, making it impossible to put our rivers and seas first,” he said.

James Wallace, CEO of River Action UK, echoed this call.

“These devastating figures show yet again that our government regulators have put polluters’ profits before people and our planet,” he said.

“With the general election looming we need the new government to regulate water companies with the full force of the law, prioritising cleaning up our rivers, securing freshwater and restoring nature.

“Failing companies should be put into special administration and refinanced with customer and public interests as well as environmental sustainability used as measures of financial performance.”