Our past, present and future

Privatisation was driven by the urgent need to clean up rivers and bathing waters after decades of under-investment. At that point, river health was poor and fewer than a third of beaches met environmental standards. Private capital was essential to meet tougher EU and UK regulations, modernise treatment works and cut sewage discharges. Since privatisation, across the sector nearly £160 billion has been invested, helping transform environmental performance, with the number of beaches rated ‘Excellent’ doubling from one third to two thirds.

In 2016, the Environment Agency started an investigation into a small number of our wastewater treatment sites. They found that illegal sewage spills had occurred between 2010 - 2015 resulting in an Environment Agency prosecution and a £90 million fine. 

Our own internal review discovered a problem with sampling processes at some of our sites, which meant that we needed to restate our wastewater performance for the period 2010–17. The findings of this review were shared with our regulators. 

In June 2017, Ofwat, our regulator, started an investigation into possible breaches of licence conditions and our statutory reporting obligations relating to the management and operation of certain of our wastewater treatment works. In October 2019, following Ofwat’s investigation, we gave undertakings to make rebates to customers totalling £123 million alongside a number of other actions, and paid a £3 million fine.  This was all a recognition of our failure to meet the expectations of our customers and wider stakeholders, as well as our regulators. The Environment Agency continues its own investigation into these issues, and we continue to fully co-operate with them. 

Since 2016, we’ve been working to fix what went wrong - overhauling processes, strengthening controls, and investing heavily in improvements to prevent anything like this from happening again. 

Since launching our Turnaround Plan in April 2023, we’ve completed 103 major improvement projects and invested £150 million to make water supplies more reliable. Leakage is down nearly 10%, and unplanned outages continue to fall. To protect rivers and seas, we opened a 24/7 Control Centre using realtime data from 32,000 digital sewer monitors. We invested £23 million across the wastewater network and 3,500 pumping stations - helping cut pollutions by a quarter since 2023 and by nearly 40% since 2020. The Southern Water Clean Rivers and Seas Task Force has also exceeded its targets for reducing storm overflow releases. For customers, we autoenrolled 18,000 people onto support tariffs, expanded our Priority Services Register to 300,000, and reached more than 32,000 young people through our education programme.