So why are bills increasing now?
Since 2020, your bills were reduced (by around 6% per year) because of penalties from our regulators, resulting in rebates on your bills.
Our shareholders paid for this, not customers. They have invested nearly £2 billion (since 2021) to speed up improvements to your services – that’s around £1,500 per household over the past five years. At the same time, we haven’t paid our shareholders anything since 2017.
We need to fundamentally change the way we think about capturing, treating, supplying, using, and recycling water. It’s our most precious resource and we can’t ‘make’ more of it.
There are a few reasons why your bill is going up
The bill reductions mentioned above only apply until 2025.
Costs for services we use to supply your water and take your wastewater away – like chemicals and energy – have increased alongside other daily essentials.
Changes to our climate mean we’re experiencing heavier rainfall, which can overwhelm our networks, causing increased flooding and storm overflow releases. We’re already adapting these systems, although it will take time. Our Clean Rivers and Seas Plan is delivering improvements in your area and explains how we plan to deliver more.
A growing population means more built-up spaces and less water being soaked up by the land. This again causes more flooding and storm overflow releases. We need to change the way we deal with this excess water to stop it entering sewers, finding new ways to capture it, soak it up and store it.
We’re also seeing increased pressure on rivers and other water sources, as more people rely on them. We can only take so much water from them before we start to damage the surrounding environment, so we need to find or develop new sources of water. This will increase the cost of treating and supplying it to your taps, as we’ll need to spend more money recycling wastewater, transferring water from other areas of the country or, eventually, even desalinating sea water.
