Restoring our Waters: Britain’s Water Company Crisis

Chair: Jeremy Hargreaves MBE; Aide: Chloe Hutchinson; Hall Aide: Baroness Kitching

Submitted by: 14 members 
Mover: Tim Farron MP (Spokesperson for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 
Summation: Charlie Maynard MP (Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury)

Conference notes that:

1. The privatised water industry model has completely failed; water companies have accumulated £70 billion in debt and paid out £83 billion in inflation-adjusted dividends since privatisation - compared to just £236 billion spent on infrastructure over the same period.
2. Up to 20 per cent of an average customer’s water bill now goes purely to servicing corporate debt, rising to 28 per cent for Thames Water customers.
3. An average of 3 billion litres of water is wasted every day in England and Wales due to leaky pipes, with Thames Water ranking as the worst offender with a three-year average of 592 million litres lost per day.
4. Over 2.5 million households are currently in debt to their water company, highlighting a growing crisis of water poverty across the country.
5. Liberal Democrats have consistently led the charge for structural reform, having called since November 2022 for the replacement of Ofwat, a position vindicated by the Independent Water Commission’s final report in July 2025.
6. Water companies continue to discharge sewage at unknown volumes into rivers, lakes, and coastlines while simultaneously handing out massive executive bonuses and failing to invest in fixing crumbling infrastructure.
7. Both Labour and the Conservatives refused to support any of the 44 amendments tabled by the Liberal Democrats to the Water (Special Measures) Bill, which covered pollution targets, executive bonus bans, volume monitoring and mutual ownership.
8. Failing water companies are currently negotiating restructuring deals with creditors at billpayers' expense, despite clearly meeting the insolvency and performance grounds, set out in legislation, which should trigger them being taken into an administration process.
9. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) also known as ‘forever chemicals’, have been found in all but one of tested UK rivers, harming nature and human health.

Conference believes that:

1. Profit must never again be put before the environment, public health or billpayers.
2. It is essential that water companies operate on a stable financial footing, so that they can afford to invest in the things that matter – upgrading infrastructure, increasing capacity at sewage treatment works, cleaning up lakes, rivers and seas and improving customer service.
3. Ofwat is entirely unfit to hold failing monopolies to account, and the current regulatory framework must be fundamentally replaced, not just rebranded.
4. True environmental justice and long-term financial sustainability can only be achieved by moving away from shareholder-first structures towards a model that puts public benefit at its heart.
5. Mutually owned public benefit corporations owned by customers, professionally managed and free from the control of unaccountable investors represent the most credible alternative to the broken privatised model.
6. Under a mutual model, investment in renewing water assets would take priority over dividend payouts, offering the most direct route to ending the sewage crisis.
7. Water poverty is a serious and growing injustice, and no household should be unable to afford a basic necessity while water companies reward executives and service corporate debt.
8. Transparency and data accountability are essential for tackling pollution; without accurate volume monitoring of sewage spills, meaningful targets cannot be set and enforcement cannot follow.

Conference calls on the Government to:

1. Replace Ofwat urgently with a new, powerful Clean Water Authority with the statutory powers to end the sewage scandal, ban unjustified bonuses and hold water executives legally accountable (while allocating Ofwat powers in Wales to Natural Resources Wales).
2. Convert failing water companies into Mutually Owned Public Benefit Corporations that are professionally managed, jointly owned by customers, with all surpluses reinvested directly into the water system rather than paid out as dividends.
3. Require water companies to monitor and publish live volume data for sewage spills, not just the duration of the spill, to ensure that pollution can be accurately measured, transparently reported and effectively targeted.
4. Introduce a nation-wide single social tariff for water bills to guarantee that vulnerable households are protected from sky-rocketing costs.
5. Publish a clear policy setting out when the Environment Secretary will make an application to the High Court to place a failing water company into a SAR, as recommended by the Cunliffe Review.
6. Create an additional environmental trigger for Special Administration of water companies, transferring operations to a mutual benefit model where there is chronic or egregious environmental failure.
7. Establish an Environmental Improvement Objective so that the new regulator does not repeat Ofwat’s failure to invest in nature and enforce environmental standards.
8. Pursue a four nations agreement to introduce a PFAS restriction to prevent the manufacture and release of ‘forever chemicals’, alongside a PFAS remediation fund requiring polluters to pay for cleaning up forever chemical pollution.

Applicability: England and Wales except for 8. which is Federal.

Mover: 7 minutes; summation of motion and movers and summation of any amendments: 4 minutes; all other speakers: 3 minutes. For eligibility and procedure for speaking in this debate, see page 10 of the agenda. You can submit a speaker's card online here or in person.

The deadline for amendments to this motion is 13.00 Monday 7 September; see pages 11-12 of the agenda for more information.

Those selected for debate will be printed in Conference Extra and Tuesday’s Conference Daily. The deadline for requests for separate votes is 09.00 Monday 21 September; see page 9 of the agenda for more information.