Water That Works: Accountability, Enforcement, Protection

Campaign Overview

England’s water system faces a mounting risk, not from workers, and not from customers, but from a regulatory framework that has allowed private water companies to fail without consequences.

Repeated pollution incidents, rising bills, excessive executive pay, dividend extraction, and chronic under-investment in infrastructure are not accidental. They are the predictable outcome of weak enforcement, weak regulators, and penalties so small they are treated as a cost of doing business. This has culminated in the regulator, Ofwat, permitting a 36% water bill increase by 2030 in the UK, effectively forcing households to pay for these corporate failures.

The Workers of England Union’s Water That Works campaign, which is part of the “Reinvesting Utility Profits into Infrastructure and the Economy” Campaigns, is not about ideology or ownership models. It is about making the current system work properly by forcing compliance, punishing failure, and protecting workers and the public from bearing the costs of corporate mismanagement.

The Workers of England Union represents members across health, local government, construction, logistics, utilities, and environmental services. Our members deal daily with the consequences of water company failure, such as polluted rivers affecting public health, infrastructure breakdowns delaying construction, rising household bills squeezing wages, and environmental damage undermining local economies.

This campaign demands regulation with teeth, penalties that genuinely deter, and investment rules that stop profits being extracted while infrastructure crumbles. WEU also wants this to happen while ensuring workers are not made scapegoats or landed with higher costs for failures they did not create.

Campaign Principles

WEU’s Water That Works campaign is built on five clear principles:

• Accountability before ideology: The problem is not private ownership; it is failure without consequence.
• Polluters must pay, not workers or households: Regulatory penalties must land on profits, dividends, executive pay and bonuses, not bills or jobs.
• Investment must be mandatory, not optional: Profits must be demonstrably reinvested into infrastructure before shareholder extraction is permitted.
• Regulators must regulate: Ofwat and environmental regulators must act independently, transparently and decisively.
• Workers’ interests must be protected: No restructuring, cost-shifting or “efficiency savings” imposed on staff without clear, measurable public benefit.

Core Campaign Demands

1. Stronger Regulatory Enforcement

• Automatic penalties for sewage spills, infrastructure failures and permit breaches
• Penalties scaled to company turnover, not fixed fines
• Repeat offenders subject to escalating sanctions

2. Mandatory Reinvestment Rules

• Legal requirement that profits are reinvested into maintenance and upgrades before dividends are paid
• Independent verification of reinvestment spending
• Suspension of dividends where investment targets are missed

3. Executive Accountability

• Personal financial penalties for senior executives overseeing repeated failures
• Bonus bans linked to environmental or service breaches
• Enhanced director disqualification powers for persistent non-compliance

4. Worker Protection Guarantees

• No job losses, pension erosion or workload increases used to offset regulatory penalties
• No bill increases passed on to workers or consumers to fund fines
• Worker consultation embedded into regulatory intervention processes

5. Transparent Oversight

• Public reporting of spills, fines, reinvestment and executive pay
• Parliamentary scrutiny of Ofwat and environmental regulators
• Clear enforcement timelines with published outcomes