The call to scrap Ofwat has struck a chord with Independent readers, who overwhelmingly agree the water regulator has failed to hold companies accountable after decades of pollution, crumbling infrastructure, and rising bills.
A landmark review led by former Bank of England deputy governor Sir Jon Cunliffe concluded that Ofwat should be dismantled and replaced with a powerful single regulator covering the entire water system.
The current setup, the Independent Water Commission said, is “fragmented and overlapping” and has allowed private companies to extract billions in shareholder payouts while sewage spills surged and investment lagged behind.
When we asked for your views, 86 per cent of readers said Ofwat should be scrapped entirely, with only 14 per cent favouring reform over replacement.
Many also backed wider changes, including new regional authorities, stronger environmental oversight and tougher rules on company ownership and debt.
But the strongest opinions focused on ownership itself: whether water, a vital natural resource, should ever have been privatised in the first place.
Some readers argued that the damage is now too deep to reverse, with nationalisation legally fraught and prohibitively expensive. Others insisted that public control is the only way to fix a system that has lost public trust.
Here’s what you had to say:
Only reward acceptable performance
I don’t care how it is structured, as long as they are only rewarded for delivering acceptable levels of purity, availability, leakage, and pollution.
Jim Kit
The horse has bolted
Many individuals here mistakenly think nationalisation is the answer. It isn’t. Nationalising privatised water companies would force the government (and so taxpayers) to buy them back at market value or face legal battles with domestic and foreign investors under international trade agreements.
These companies carry massive debts, which would transfer to the public, burdening taxpayers with billions in liabilities. Further, compensation claims and lawsuits from investors would escalate costs, making nationalisation an expensive and legally risky process with no guarantee of improved service.
Privatisation was craftily set up so as to be more or less irreversible. The horse has bolted, I’m afraid.
Musil
Foreign ownership makes it worse
“National strategic assets should never ever be in the hands of private companies” – I agree, and it’s worse if those companies are based outside the UK. They will be even more disinterested in any sort of service. Vital infrastructure should be publicly owned: rail, buses, trams, electricity, gas, water. I don’t think we’re quite there yet with broadband.
But nationalising needs to be done very carefully. I don’t think anyone can claim that old BR and BT were paragons of efficiency. And local councils have their part to play by carefully scheduling road dig-ups across utilities – there’s a lot of pipework that’s been left to rot whilst dividends are paid.
Premium
Mismanagement should mean re-nationalisation
Pass a law to legislate that if privatised public utilities or services are mismanaged, they pass back into public ownership. Simple.
BigDogSmallBrain
Nobody should own water
Nobody should be the owner of water. Water should just be managed in the name of the people, and any profit should be entirely coincidental.
There is zero need to have financially motivated ownership of water, along the same lines as why nobody owns air, oxygen, or sunshine.
ItReallyIsNot
Crumbling infrastructure is the real crisis
The elephant in the room is the increasing population/increasing housing requirements, along with combined sewers carrying sewage and rainwater. More people/homes means more sewage/rainwater run-off, and when it rains hard, any treatment works are unable to cope with the volume of water piped to them.
For example, the Trafford Centre’s rainwater is kept separate from sewage and can go straight into the nearby canal, being clean water. That water is as much as 10 cubic metres per second! Now consider the tens of thousands of homes, businesses, roads, car parks, etc. that add up to a lot more area, all funnelling their rainwater into the local sewage works, and you can see what the problem is.
To properly solve it would require every household and business to have expensive work done to install separate rainwater drains, and for every single road in the area to be dug up to install a parallel piping system to keep rainwater separated from sewage.
Much of the main piping has been in place since before WW2, when there were far fewer people, homes, and large businesses.
SteveW
Driven by profit
National strategic assets should never, ever be in the hands of private companies
They are driven by profit above all else… and when they fail… we end up footing the bill anyway. All privatisation does is make a few people very rich.
captaintripps
Productivity
I agree in principle, but the trouble with nationalised industries is that down the line, they will all cause problems. The issue is productivity: “Why should I work hard when I’ve got a guaranteed job for life?” Maybe not so much on the water supply side, but all other nationalised industries suffered from this communist idea. It sounds good on paper, but in practice, it doesn’t work.
Now, nationalising industries without union interference or job protection, and you’ll have something.
StevetheBarbarian
Nationalise now!
There is absolutely no benefit in privatising a public utility that is also a monopoly. Privatised water companies are in competition with no one, so there is no pressure to decrease prices or improve services. They serve two masters: increased pay at the top and profit for shareholders. Nationalise it now!
bloodwort
Break up regional monopolies
Like most basic utilities, privatisation provides none of the potential benefits and all of the worst drawbacks. It is difficult to innovate with a product as simple as water, while the most important features – safety, the environment, and keeping down the price – are anathema to profit-driven organisations.
At the very least, the regional monopolies need to be broken up.
Aimeryan
They are just laughing at us all
It will never get fixed until those responsible for running the industry are properly held accountable. Until then, they are just laughing at us all – literally laughing all the way to the bank.
captaintripps
It can’t be fixed
It can’t be fixed. And there’s no way to nationalise it without spending about a trillion pounds to buy the companies and pay off the bondholders. There is no solution; it’s only going to get worse.
BlueWhale
Some of the comments have been edited for this article for brevity and clarity.
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