In the debate on Monday, MP after MP of all political stripes stood up to lambast the performance of Thames Water. We were clear. Thames Water is a mess, and it is time to admit that it’s a failing company and it needs putting out of its misery by allowing it to fall into administration and the debt and company to be restructured.
I have too many constituent cases of Thames Water’s incompetence and disregard for customers to all raise them in one speech. But some bear repeating to show just why this company deserves our ire.
Last year, Robert, aged 81, from Abingdon, received a water bill for—you are reading this correctly—£39,000. Thames Water reviewed this case, and considered a fair bill on reflection to be £37,688.64. He and his partner Patricia said, quite understandably, that they had become ill from stress because of the bill. It took two months, my direct intervention and a BBC story to cancel the absurd charge, which was of course due to a Thames Water leak anyway.
And then there’s Len and Jenny. In their 80s and in frail health, they lost basic sanitation to their home in 2023. A blocked pipe caused sewage to enter through air bricks and they were left with no toilet, no washing facilities and no power. All they had was a portaloo in their garden and a tanker to pump out sewage. Foul waste continued to bubble up through the basin in their bathroom. We are now in 2026, and Jenny and Len still do not have the recommended non-return valve, a firm date for the maintenance or compensation. If Thames Water cannot even do those basics, what can it do?
All the while, Thames Water is hiking its prices to desperately avoid being overwhelmed by its enormous pile of debt. Customers experienced a 31% rise in prices this year. If this were a proper private company, it could not ask customers to pay more for this level of service, yet that is exactly what it has done, and people feel they’re had no meaningful say in the process. Thousands across Oxfordshire have signed a Lib Dem petition to axe the price hike. It’s simply unfair especially at a time when people are struggling.
We need to be clear that Thames Water staff are not to blame for the current woes and dismal performance. In July, I visited Abingdon sewage treatment works, and friendly and knowledgeable people who had worked there for decades told me how the system is supposed to work: tanks remove the sludge, microbes digest bacteria and water is discharged. Water so clean that I could have drunk from it there and then—in fact, a heron strutted around the wetland ponds showing exactly what would have been possible. Sadly, that summer idyll is all too frequently shattered when the rain falls, the floodgates open and raw sewage pours out.
We need additional capital investment; in Abingdon specifically, the staff were asking for another set of tanks to filter and clean the sewage to help that problem there, but it is the same everywhere. Last year, Thames Water admitted that £19 billion of its assets were deemed “poor” or “failed”, posing a risk to thousands of homes.
Instead of investing, Thames Water has chosen to funnel profits into dividends. As recently as March 2024, the company paid £158.3 million out to shareholders. This is a company that is hanging on to a lifeline of creditor goodwill, having already raced through £1.5 billion of the emergency cash that was injected 11 months ago. The scale of the mismanagement is staggering.
For decades, every Government of every colour have presided over some form of this mess. But I do not want to blame; I just want solutions. Labour MP Daniel Francis questioned in the debate “At what stage will we say that enough is enough and we need to take a different direction?”
Well, constituents of Oxford West and Abingdon have had more than enough. I strongly urge the Government to consider the Liberal Democrats’ plans to turn it into a public benefit company. That is not public ownership. The taxpayer would not take on the debt, but the profits would be invested back into infrastructure and fixing the problem, not used to enrich the likes of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and the China Investment Corporation.
I hope Emma Hardy will join me in making a new year’s resolution—that this is the year we sort out Thames Water’s mess, for the sake of people and our planet, once and for all.
Thames Water will inevitably fail – it should be allowed to
