Medway Liberal Democrats respond to Ofwat's Water Company Performance Report 2023-24 

Ofwat's Water Company Performance Report 2023-24 again shows Southern Water’s failure to invest locally in our vital water infrastructure. This performance has been unchecked and allowed to become ‘business as usual’, so we're pleased to see that Ofwat have imposed fines of poorly performing companies. Despite this, Medway Liberal Democrats continue to be concerned that the figures cited in today's announcement reveal the systematic issues within the water industry that we have long campaigned on. 

John Castle, spokesperson for Medway Liberal Democrats said 'This Ofwat report just shows we are still living with the consequences of 14 years of Conservative weak action against sewage pollution. Yet even now the new Labour Government are repeating the same mistakes and not getting to the root of the problem. We need to replace Ofwat with a tough regulatory body and bring water companies out of private ownership. We need them to focus on performance and not profits.

We are very lucky to live in Medway with pleasant walks around St Mary’s Island and the wetlands in Rainham on our doorstep. We must do everything to protect River Medway so that the whole community can benefit. However, the national scandal of water companies dumping sewage into lakes and rivers threatens to damage the beauty of our surroundings. In 2023 Southern Water was recorded as having 58.9 incidents per 10,000 km of sewers of sewage discharge across our local rivers. That’s 2.6 times greater than the committed target of 22.4 and the 2nd worst in the country – and many of these discharges were illegal. This situation is completely unacceptable.

Thankfully the water regulator, for so long toothless, is finally waking up to the scale of the public’s outrage and we are starting to see some meaningful penalties being imposed upon the worst offenders. However, I remember that the water industry handed out more than £1.4 billion to their shareholders in dividends last year, and the imposed fine is just £1.9million. Until the ability of these polluting companies to hand out so much cash is severely curtailed, pollution will continue to be a highly profitable activity with inadequate incentives for the water companies to fix their creaking infrastructure and stop filling our rivers with raw sewage.’

ENDS

Attachment: Ofwat's Water Company Performance Report 2023-24

https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/publication/water-company-performance-report-2023-24/